At Wikimedia México, we are excited to share that, for the first time ever in Mexico, in joint effort with the Franz Mayer Museum, we released a set of books in their entirety to the Wikimedia Projects.

These books include not only Incunabula, but also books on ancient Mexican art, metallurgy, navigation, traditional medicine, horology, astrology, and religion. These are now available on Wikimedia Commons for the first time to be openly consulted and downloaded anywhere in the world.

As part of their celebrations for International Book Day, we took part in the Franz Mayer Museum’s Digital Library opening discussion on April 25th, 2025. There, we shared experiences and challenges on book safekeeping, digitization, preservation, and knowledge-spreading.

We held a conversation with Ricardo Paquini, manager of UNAM’s Laboratorio de Restauración y Conservación; Baltazar Brito, Director at the Museo Nacional de Antropología e Historia’s Library; Eduardo Limón, science writer and journalist; Tania Vargas, Chief of Franz Mayer Museum’s Acervos Documentales y Biblioteca; and Iván Martínez, historian, journalist, humans rights advocate and Wikipedian for the past 18 years. We discussed the complexities of releasing books such as these and the challenges of the digitization process: infrastructure, funding, safekeeping, and technique, combined with institutional reluctance to opening their archives and how it negatively impacts opportunities to make heritage works accessible to the public.

At the end of the discussion, the participants visited the digitization lab and the Bookeye 5 V1A scanner, acquired with funding from the German Embassy in Mexico. The pledge to keep the scanner is to digitize 45 books, 13 of which are in Spanish, Latin, Dutch, and English, all available in their digital library. Thanks to the partnership with Wikimedia México, we organized an edit-a-thon on Franz Mayer Museum’s Fondo Antiguo. Now, 2 600 files from this collection are available in 300 PPI through Wikimedia Commons.

Digitizing these books took three months of work. Thanks to the Wikimedia México volunteer community, as well as open knowledge and book enthusiasts, we spent an entire afternoon contributing to this release during the edit-a-thon.

Among the works of this first release, we feature Cronicarum per viam epithomatis breviarij compilati opus, considered as one of the peak incunabula printing works, both for its structure and for being the most pictorial of the entire period; Historiarum ab inclinatione Romanorum Imperii. Lber Primus, the oldest incunabulum of the Franz Mayer Museum, telling the story of Europe and Christianity, starting from the looting of Rome by the Goths in 410 A.D. up to 1442. It was the first to divide the history into three periods or ages, as well as to use the concept of the Medioevo to refer to the Middle Ages.

Once again, we thank the Franz Mayer Museum for their great contribution to open knowledge and for their trust in releasing these works to the world hand in hand with Wikimedia México.