Daniel Rico, UAB Libraries' Friend Award 2025 for his work at the Humanities Library

Yesterday evening, during the 2025 UAB Friends Awards celebration held at the Casa de Convalescència in Barcelona, the UAB Library Service presented the Libraries’ Friend Award to Professor Daniel Rico Camps. The accolade recognised his exceptional work in overseeing the donation of his father Francisco Rico’s personal and professional library and archive to the UAB Humanities Library.

The donation includes approximately 30,000 volumes covering a broad range of subjects, such as Spanish Golden Age literature, the picaresque novel, Italian Humanism and the works of Cervantes, as well as materials related to the history of printing and Latin and medieval literature, among others. This collection will become an essential resource for researchers in the fields of Humanities and Philology.

Daniel Rico has been Senior Lecturer in the Department of Art and Musicology at the UAB since 2002 and is currently the Head of the Department. In addition to his academic work on medieval art, epigraphy and heritage theory, he has held other positions of responsibility at the university, including coordinator of the Degree in Art History between 2021 and 2023 and Director of the Institute for Medieval Studies between 2018 and 2021. He has also directed the collections El espejo y la lámpara and 50 Anys d’Experiències UAB, and served as editor of the journal Locus Amoenus.

During 2024 and 2025, Daniel Rico worked actively on the selection, classification and transfer of his father’s collection to the library, maintaining constant contact with the technical team of the Humanities Library to ensure that the legacy was processed in an orderly manner and given maximum visibility.

Professor Francisco Rico (1942–2024), Chair of the Department of Spanish Philology at the UAB and member of the Royal Spanish Academy, the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei and the British Academy, was one of the leading scholars of Spanish and European literature. His legacy includes a bibliographic collection that reflects not only his academic career but also a valuable source for scholars of Spanish and European literature.

This edition of the Awards also recognised the UAB European Documentation Centre (CDE) with the Collective Award, in acknowledgement of its more than four decades of work in disseminating knowledge about the European Union, offering resources and training activities that have been key for the university community.