News
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.