But to reach this amount of digitized ancient books has not been easy. Six years ago we had only 2 thousand 8 hundred (2,800) scanned books.

Although this collection was the largest in Spain we were far from being satisfied:

• The pace of digitization had been slow, which made it very difficult to extend the project to include all our cultural heritage within a reasonable period of time.
• At this rate we would take more than 400 yearse to scan the number of books we scanned with Google in 3 years.
• Dissemination on the Internet was poor owing to the local nature of the project and Portal deficiencies: The portal was not multilingual, not adapted to social web developmentshad and had not long term digital preservation.

It was therefore necessary to find an alternative digitization model and migrate to a large-scale model that by then was already being implemented by Google.