Spanish Biographical Dictionary to be fully available online in 2010

From: ARS News

Spain’s Real Academia de la Historia (Royal Academy of History) will publish before the end of the year six volumes of the Spanish Biographical Dictionary, and within two years the remaining 44 volumes of the monumental work will be placed online so that the entire collection will be on the Internet probably in 2010.

“As soon as we have several volumes published, we will immediately ‘post’ the entire book on the Web. In this way, it will acquire a worldwide dimension,” said Academy director Gonzalo Anes, who added that the institution is publishing the Dictionary thanks to the sponsorship of the Marcelino Botín Foundation.

Anes also emphasized the Academy’s project to translate the Dictionary into English so that it can also be accessed online in that language. “Then, worldwide distribution will certainly be assured,” he said.

The Dictionary was a project that the Academy nurtured from its founding in 1735, but its complexity and the difficulty of communications delayed it for centuries.

The 50 volumes of the Dictionary, each of which consists of about 800 pages, and the more than 40,000 biographies it contains of personalities from all epochs of Spanish history “place Spain at the level of the most important countries of the world,” the director said.

The more than 40,000 biographies were made possible thanks to “the important collaboration” of 5,500 experts, among them a good number of Hispanic American historians and “Hispanicists from all over the world,” Anes added.

For the past six months, the Academy has posted on its Web page (www.rah.es) a preview of what the online Biographical Dictionary will be like.