The BNE has digitized and made millions of documents available to the public and has effectively adopted policies of openness, free access, and reuse of heritage.

For more than 300 years, the National Library of Spain has been the highest institution responsible for the preservation of the documentary heritage of Spain, for the description, identification, custody, and promotion of the Spanish bibliographic and documentary heritage. To continue fulfilling their specific mission in a context of technological change and permanent innovation, the BNE is in a process of constant adaptation to an environment in which there have been radical changes in the way of creating, publishing, promoting and accessing information, which has generated new ways of storing, conserving and transmitting awareness.

The BNE digitization process began at the end of the 1990 as a way of preserving delicate collections such as the historical press and as a gradual replacement of the microfilming process. In 2008, the first massive project for the digitization of physical collections was undertaken thanks to Telefónica, first, and the collaboration with Red.es, later, which made it possible to continue the digital transformation and open new ways of use, reuse of collections and citizen participation, of which the BNELab platform is a good example.

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