Launched in the latter half of 2010 by the Biblioteca Nacional de España (BNE), Spain's national library, Quijote Interactivo is an interactive, digital edition of Miguel de Cervantes's literary magnum opus, Don Quixote (El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha). The site offers high resolution page images of all 1,282 pages of the original Spanish edition of the two‐part novel (1605 and 1615) along with additional multimedia content on publication history of the work and background information on the culture, history, and art of the Spanish “golden age” (the early seventeenth‐century). Although scholars and students of peninsular Spanish literature have printed facsimiles and newer scholarly editions of the novel are available, the simple, intuitive presentation of the e‐text version of first edition in Quijote Interactivo, along with the added benefits of searchable text and the additional web content, will appeal to both researchers consulting the text for their projects and students of Spanish who often favor online texts and the electronic book reading experience. This site will serve as an excellent example of how the digitization efforts at large national and research libraries can now produce a web‐based platform though which they can share the treasures of their national heritage worldwide.
The text and the commands for the site are all in Spanish, but it uses visual icons and clear symbols to indicated basic functions. The start page contains information on the digitization project and a site map of the functions, multimedia features, and a dateline for the project. It requires an updated version of the Adobe Flash Player, and the site works best on a high‐speed internet connection (this reviewer experienced some difficulty accessing it on various wireless connections). Users must click on the image of the book to access the actual digital work, or can go directly to http://quijote.bne.es/libro/). The page does take some time to load during with the screen is filled with floating images the famous opening lines of the novel translated into many different languages. The digital text is represented as a book and readers can use the right and left arrows to turn the virtual pages. The scanned images of the 1605 printed text of Part I and the 1615 text of Part II are crisp and clear, and a magnifying glass icon enables the reader to blow up different segments of the page. The T icon lets the reader view a more legible plain text transcription of the work instead of the original page images. The transcription standardizes the typography of the book; for example, the use of “u” for the letter “v” in the original typeface is eliminated, so the name “Ceruantes” on the title page is rendered “Cervantes” in the transcript. Archaic Spanish spellings are also modernized and regularized without changing the substance of the text. Most noticeably, the name “Quixote” in the original printed text appears in its more familiar modern Spanish form “Quijote” in the transcript. The box labelled Buscar (Search) allows readers to search for words or phrases in the text, although advanced searching for different words or proximity searching is not possible in this interface. Readers can jump to specific page numbers or use the page menu to view multiple pages at once. The Compartir (Share) icon allows users to email specific pages or even the whole book, share the pages on Facebook, or copy the URL for a specific page; users can also print the current page view. A wav file of Renaissance music automatically starts playing once the page loads, but it can be silenced. The site makes the reading of the actual seventeenth‐century text by contemporary readers as easy as possible while preserving the appearance of the early book.
The multimedia supplements, located on the left‐hand navigational panel, greatly enrich the reading experience for students seeking to learn more about the work in the context of early seventeenth‐century Spain. A map of Don Quixote's adventures, digitized from the BNE collection, charts the journeys of the would‐be knight and his squire throughout the Iberian Peninsula, and can be adjusted in scale like a Google Map. A timeline of editions from 1605 up to 1941 complete with scanned title pages and information about the production of the edition and its printers is a valuable resource for bibliophiles. The section on Libros de Cavaleria (Books of Chivalry) offers an overview of the books in Don Quixote's library that inspired him on his rather foolish quests and gives the reader a better understanding of the literary context out of which Cervantes's satire emerged. Other features include information on daily life in seventeenth‐century Spain (food, theatre, dance, games), a gallery of illustrations of scenes from the book by various authors, tracks of music from the 1700s, and a video of Manuel de Falla's one‐act puppet opera El retablo de maese Pedro which is based on an episode from Don Quixote.
Quijote Interactivo demonstrates how digital technology help make the rare books and other unique cultural artifacts housed in large national repositories more readily accessible to a global audience. Like the digital Gallica (http://gallica.bnf.fr) collection from the French Bibliothèque Nationale, this site provides an invaluable resource for scholars, Spanish language students, and literature lovers alike.
