The UNE and the Spanish National Library have signed an innovative agreement to coordinate electronic legal deposits.

The Spanish National Library (BNE) and the Union of Spanish University Publishers (UNE) have signed an agreement to coordinate and guarantee legal deposits of electronic publications published by the UNE’s associates, as well as the metadata necessary for their description and access.

There are currently 70 university and research center publishers in the UNE, who combined have a digital catalog of nearly 12,000 electronic books, a resource that will soon be added to the institutional depository of the Spanish National Library (BNE), which was set up to store publications brought in by way of electronic legal deposit, to ensure their long-term preservation.

This process shall be performed through Unebook, the distribution portal for Spanish university books created by the UNE in 2014, and entrusted with the task of providing, twice a year, both venal and open access. The agreement specifies that consultation of restricted access works by users will be done through workstations installed on BNE premises and in the conservation centers of autonomous communities and that the National Library may sign agreements with the rights holders to enable public distribution of the contents deposited.

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