Javier Lasso de la Vega Jiménez-Placer

Javier Lasso de la Vega Jiménez-Placer (1892–1990) was a Spanish librarian, archivist, and pioneer of information science.

Life

Javier Lasso de la Vega Jiménez-Placer was born on 12 June 1892 in Seville, Spain, into a well-to-do family. He studied Philosophy and Letters and Law at the University of Seville.

Between 1915 and 1918, he served as director of the Archaeological Museum of Cádiz.

In 1919, while attending a gathering at a café in Seville, Lasso de la Vega was invited by acquaintances to join the Isis y Osiris Masonic lodge. Although there is no evidence that he formally became a Freemason, his application was recorded in the registers of the Grand Council in December of that year. In 1940, after Francisco Franco established the Special Tribunal for the Repression of Freemasonry and Communism (Tribunal Especial para la Represión de la Masonería y el Comunismo, TERMC), disciplinary proceedings were initiated against him. Thanks to testimonies from friends and colleagues, he was eventually able to prove that he had never been a Freemason and was reinstated in his position.

Lasso de la Vega was a member of the Corps of Archivists, Librarians and Museum Curators (Cuerpo Facultativo de Archivos, Bibliotecas y Museos). He served as Director of the University Library of Madrid from 1932 to 1962, with the exception of the periods corresponding to the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and from 1942 to 1945.

He furthered his education through study visits to several American universities, including the Universities of Vermont, Columbia, Yale, Harvard, and Boston.

In March 1938, during the Spanish Civil War, he was appointed Head of the Service of Archives, Libraries and Intellectual Property Registry in Franco's first government. He held this position until the service was dissolved in August 1939. During this period, he was responsible for safeguarding Spain's cultural heritage and preventing the destruction of valuable historical collections and assets.

In addition to this post, during the Civil War and the immediate post-war years he served as library adviser to the Women's Section (Sección Femenina) of the Falange Española. He was also a member of the Regulatory Commission for the Paper Branch of the Chemical Industry and of the commission responsible for approving secondary-school textbooks, among other public appointments.

Lasso de la Vega was a strong advocate of the essential role of school libraries in the education of citizens. He promoted a ministerial initiative, inspired by the British model, to regulate the use of school libraries and library practice in primary education, although the proposal was ultimately unsuccessful.

He was also one of the leading promoters of the adoption of the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) in Spain.

In 1977, Lasso de la Vega took part in the Course for Information and Documentation Consultants, which gave rise to Fundesco's Red INCA project, one of Spain's earliest initiatives in information networking and online searching. He later served as librarian of the Telefónica Foundation (Fundesco), where he devised a library classification system that he named Funla, a contraction of Fundación and Lasso.

He died in Madrid on 3 November 1990.

Contributions

Throughout his career, Lasso de la Vega held several senior positions in the Spanish library system. He is chiefly remembered for his efforts to safeguard Spain's cultural heritage during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), for his advocacy of school libraries as a cornerstone of education, and above all for authoring what are widely regarded as the first books on Information Science published in Spain.

Publications

El trabajo intelectual. Normas, técnicas y ejercicios de documentación (1975). Paraninfo, 320 pp. ISBN: 978-84-283-0691-1

Cómo se hace una tesis doctoral: (manual de documentación): 1 (Instrumentos) (1976). Fundación Universitaria Española, 912 pp. ISBN: ‎ 978-84-7392-114-5

Técnicas de investigación y documentacicón. Normas y ejercicios (1980). Thomson Paraninfo. ISBN: 978-84-283-1042-0

See a list of his works on: https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/autor?codigo=3233069

Life

Contributions

Publications

Further reading