After decades of neglect, over 15,000 Spanish plays that formerly lay on the balcony of Baker Library's Tower Room have finally been fully catalogued and integrated into the library's collections.
Originally purchased between 1929 and 1936 from an Spanish dealer, the plays were rediscovered three and a half years ago by Miguel Valladares, the library reference bibliographer, according to professor Marsha Swislocki, chair of the department of Spanish and Portuguese.
In the intervening time, College librarians Valladares and Santiago Sanchez-Barbas went ahead with plans to catalogue the thousands of individual volumes, which cover a wide range of topics and which are written largely in Spanish and Catalonian.
With the help of a dedicated group of students, Swislocki said, Valladares and Sanchez-Barbas entered each play into an online catalogue in a three-year effort that concluded last March.
Over the past weekend, scholars, bibliographers and curators from Spain and the United States convened for a campus symposium to discuss the collection, exchange papers and hear a student performance of one of the plays.
Few other colleges have such large collections of Spanish plays, and even fewer have them catalogued, Swislocki said. Those that are, like the collection at Berkeley, were only catalogued within the last few years.
The catalogue has met an enthusiastic response, partly because theater was so important in Spain in the time periods covered by the collection.
"I think people have realized that reading all these plays is a wonderful way ... to learn about Spanish culture and issues of the time," she said.
Toward this goal, the department of Spanish and Portuguese has already taken advantage of the plays for use within its own course offerings. Last Friday, a crowd of over 300 attended a student performance of Carlos Arniches' "San Juan de Luz" in the Collis Center.
The play, directed by Professor Francine A'ness, was a "huge success," Swislocki said.
Some students will now be writing term papers on the plays, while both students and scholars will be able to utilize the collection for their research.
Some of the plays will be digitized so they can be viewed by anyone over the internet. Books not catalogued in any other collections will be digitized first, Swislocki said.
The collection has been moved from the Tower Room to the Treasure Room on the first floor of Baker Library.
Several different campus groups joined the Spanish and Portuguese department in hosting the weekend conference, including the Office of the Provost, the Leslie Center for the Humanities the Dickey Center, the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Baker-Berry Library, and the Consulate General of Spain in Boston, Massachusetts.
