(opens in a new window)Iberian Books is a research project based in the UCD School of History. From 2010 to 2018, it was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with the goal of offering a foundational listing of all books published in Spain, Portugal and the New World or printed elsewhere in Spanish or Portuguese during the Golden Age, 1472-1700. Over the summer of 2018, all of this data - 131,000 items, 660,000 copies, and 43,000 digital links will come on stream. In partnership with the UCD Digital Library Group, a suite of digital search tools have also been developed, allowing users to explore the wealth of information described. Along with a new multilingual interface, advanced searches will allow users to find women authors, women printers and women named as litigants in printed legal cases, to look for translations, or to search for books of a certain size. A host of new data visualisations will also assist in identifying and understanding patterns in the underlying datasets. Moreover, a second project Ornamento has been folded into the datasets, making it possible to use metadata and image-matching technology to find ornate letters, ornaments and illustrations in around a quarter of a million indexed pages. The project utterly transforms our knowledge of how the industry of print evolved in the Peninsula before 1701, and sheds new light on the shifting tastes of Iberian readers.
Printer’s Device of the Lisbon printer Manuel de Lyra, from Isidoro Velázquez’s La entrada que en el reino de Portugal hizo don Philippe, rey de las Españas, segundo deste nombre (Lisbon, Manuel de Lyra, 1583). Image courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional Digital (Portugal).