Creation of the library and document collection started taking shape in 1964 with acquisition of the 17th-20th Century monographic holdings of the bibliophile Antonio Odriozola, followed, shortly afterwards, by acquisition of the Deogracias Estavillo library with its 19th and 20th Century works.

Our holdings have increased in size since then thanks to purchases and donations contributing to creating one of the best and wealthiest Basque document collections, with its thousands of manuscripts and printed articles dating as far back as the 15th Century, now digitized for the purposes of preservation and easier consultation.

Over 80% of the library monographs date from the 20th and 21st Centuries, with articles ranging from the first editions of works by the great novelists belonging to the Generation of 1898 until the publishing boom initiated in the 80s.

These works similarly take a look at the history, social and political changes, ideologies, beliefs and thought, philosophy, law, gastronomy, art, sculpture, cinema, media and a long list of other aspects forming the Basque cultural panorama.

Emblematic journals related to Basque culture, financial reports and others brought out on the subject of all sorts of companies and institutions, press present and past, and an original fanzine collection feature in a compilation of almost 10,000 titles.

Two processes serve to simplify the search for articles. On the one hand is the analytical cataloguing and digitizing of the principle periodicals and, on the other, the digitizing of abstracts and texts in a project linking bibliographic descriptions to images.

Similarly, as part of a collaboration project with other institutions, we are currently in the process of digitizing present-day Basque newspapers.

This section was born in 1993 to preserve family archives of difficult access and make them available for research purposes. Thanks to their acquisition or temporary deposit by the families owning them, we have been able to create a database containing several thousands of catalogued and digitized documents from 13th-20th Century archives.

The photographic archive consists of the graphic holdings inherited from the former Caja de Ahorros Municipal de Vitoria, Caja Provincial de Alava, and today’s Caja Vital Kutxa, which, together with local events and activities, are a real reflection of society in Alava from the late 19th Century onwards. This collection consists of over seventy thousand articles.

There are similarly other historic archives, dating from the late-19th and early- 20th Centuries, containing almost 12,000 items on a wide variety of subjects ranging from traditional architecture, royal visits and Carlism to public works, among many others.