Continuation of the Lacunense Digital Heritage project: ULL heritage collections in open access

A new project is being presented as part of the broader initiative entitled "Digital Heritage of La Laguna," launched in 2008. This project aims to make the digitized heritage collections of the University of La Laguna available to the university community and the general public through the Maresía platform. The creation of this platform allows the University of La Laguna's heritage collections to be disseminated both within the Canary Islands and beyond, as it adheres to the OAI (Open Archives Initiative) protocol. This standard enables its content to be collected by various systems and repositories in national and international projects, such as Hispana, a portal for accessing Spanish digital heritage and a national content aggregator for Europeana (European Digital Library). This project proposes the digitization of bibliographic collections from the 16th and 17th centuries. These materials were selected because they are not yet digitized in Spain and are accessible through the Hispana portal. However, the digitization of certain copies is proposed. These copies, due to their special characteristics (such as bookplates from former owners, dedications, handwritten annotations, or censorship cuts), are unique and tell the story of our collection. This will allow us to determine whether their provenance stems from the Confiscation of Church Lands and the secularization of convents, or whether they were acquired through donations or purchases from the private libraries of prominent intellectuals in the history of the Canary Islands. Finally, the project includes the digitization of a selection of documents from the José Agustín Álvarez Rixo Archive, a highly valuable collection of unique manuscripts that chronicle the entire history of the 19th century in the Canary Islands, which has been progressively digitized.