CIB Margarita Salas commemorates Libraries Day

As every October 24, Libraries Day has been celebrated in Spain. To commemorate the Day and to give visibility to the CIB Margarita Salas' library, two outreach videos about its history and facilities have been distributed.

The CIB Margarita Salas library is considered as a reference in Biology and Biomedicine in Spain due to its multidisciplinary collection: nearly 1,400 printed titles of journals and series, as well as 12,000 book titles make up its bibliographic collection. Historically, the bibliographic holdings of this library come from the library of the Institute of Experimental Endocrinology, but they increased as the different departments and institutes that made up the CIB since 1958 were coming together (Institute of Metabolism and Nutrition, Department of Enzymology, Laboratory of Thyroid Studies, Immunology and Microbial Biology, Jaime Ferrán Institute and the José Celestino Mutis and Experimental Medicine Institutes), until their unification into a single library in 1984.

In addition, the CIB Margarita Salas Library holds two precious collections:

Legacy of Dr. Gregorio Marañón: Outstanding documentary collection: 1100 scientific and humanistic works of Dr. Marañón, bound in 34 volumes and digitized; as well as 1347 books from different fields of medicine, belonging to his private library.

Margarita Salas Center for Biological Research Archive: constituted by the transfer to the library of the graphic and documentary archive of the Spanish Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (SEBBM). This collection includes a series of digitized photographs of the VI FEBS Congress (Madrid, 1969), which was a landmark in Spanish Biochemistry. The collection can be visited in SIMURG (the portal of digitized collections of libraries and archives of the CSIC).

You can also read more about the library in an article in the CIB Margarita Salas Newsletter (p.3) number 2.

Libraries Day is celebrated since 1997 in memory of the destruction of the Sarajevo Library, which burned down in 1992 during the Balkan conflict, as a tribute and recognition of the work carried out by librarians.