PRIUS TO 1957

In 1957, the decree of December 23, 1957 (pdf) (BOE No. 17, dated 20.1.58), was adopted. This rule, that followed international guidelines on libraries, aimed at preserving the country's bibliographic heritage in order to make it possible its safeguard and future access for citizens. The mechanism that was designed to ensure this conservation was to force printers to deposit a number of copies of each publication in different State Public Libraries.

Unfortunately, with regard to the material prior to 1957, there is no guarantee of sufficient works for its preservation, which is why libraries establish special storage and loan conditions. In our case, we located them in the closed area and its loan regime is use in the library.

OUT OF PRINT

Some documents published after 1957 also need a specific location and loan regime because they are out-of-print. That means that, if the document was lost or deteriorated, it would be complicated, expensive and sometimes even impossible to replace it. That is why some of them are in closed access.

CLASICS

Some classics are placed in the closed access area because we give preference to the most recent publication documents in the reading room.

LOW USING RATES

In our collection we have documents that for different reasons present a low rate of use (which doesn´t mean that they have little informative value). In some cases they are old editions (the most recent ones can be found in the reading room), others are material that became obsolete by the subject matters evolution and sometimes are documents still perfectly usefull but don,t draw the attention of the user by its date of publication or by apathy.

One of our main missions as a library is to make sure that the material we offer satisfies your information needs, so we try to minimize the number of documents without loans. For this we make a conscientious selection work before purchasing the material, either through purchase, donation, etc ...