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Reading Rooms

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There are two Reading rooms: the General Reading Room and the Prat de la Riba Room. Each reading room has a reference collection and offers bibliographic information and reprography services. They also manage the request of documents service.

General Reading Room 

Located at the Gothic aisles of the Hospital building, it gathers 16.000 reference works of free access organized systematically. It is the room for the consultation of books from 19th century on, newspapers, journals and sound and video documents. There are:

  • 180 places equipped to connect laptops as well as a Wi-Fi service available.
  • 13 computers to the consultation of catalogs, multimedia documents, access to databases subscribed by the library and USB port. They have some office automation software installed.
  • 1 self-service black and white printing.
  • 6 places of consultation for sound and audiovisual documents
  • 4 microform readers/reproducers.
  • 4 Carrels for researchers (Use regulation)

Prat de la Riba Room

Located at the Quadra of Saint John -the convalescence room of the former Hospital- it gathers more than 3.500 reference works of free access. It is the room for the consultation of the most valuable and oldest collections of the BC (parchments, manuscripts, printed music, incunabula, old printings, engravings, maps, stamps, photographs, special collections ...). There are:

  • 14 places equipped to connect laptops as well as a Wi-Fi service available.
  • 2 computers to the consultation of catalogs, multimedia documents, access to databases subscribed by the library and USB port. They have some office automation software installed.
  • 2 microform readers/reproducers.
  • 2 places of immediate delivery of images reproduction
  • 1 piano silent
  • Lens and ultraviolet lamp available for documents with some difficulties of reading.
  • Fibre Optic Light Sheet to research of water marks and photography.