One of the greatest challenges facing Lullian scholarship is the management of the enormous volume of information regarding Llull and his works (both authentic and attributed) that has accumulated over 700 years of an uninterrupted Lullian tradition in many different countries. Llull was particularly interested in the diffusion and survival of his 265 works. The establishment of Lullian centers in many different places in Europe is in part the result of his own provisions, but also of many and varied historical circumstances.

The Ramon Llull Database (Llull DB) is an electronic bibliography aimed at systematizing and facilitating a search for all information regarding the Lullian or pseudo-Lullian opus. It was created by Anthony Bonner and developed by a group of collaborators principally from the Department of Catalan Philology and the Library of the University of Barcelona, with the participation of various institutions.

The Database provides almost complete information concerning the 265 authentic Lullian works, and as yet incomplete and/or provisional information concerning other works falsely attributed to him, such as the 150 pseudo-Lullian alchemical works, and 270 spurious works on a variety of other subjects.

In the section on Works, one can locate a Lullian work using the various pull-down menus from the catalogue of works. This, however, can also be done by entering a word or words from the title of the work sought, or from the invocation, incipit, explicit or colophon of a work.

In this section, the user can access seven different areas of information: previous catalogues and inventories which cite it, cross-references to other works by Llull cited in it or in which it is cited, the different titles it has received, incipits and explicits of its various versions, manuscripts and editions that transmit it in whatever languages it has been preserved, and finally, a bibliography on the work in question.

The Database also includes a separate section on Lullian manuscripts, where, by starting with a list of cities where said codices are located, the user can arrive at a description of and bibliographical information concerning any one of them. In this section the user can access the digitalization images of manuscripts which have appeared on the web, and especially those facilitated by the Raimundus-Lullus-Institut of Freiburg with their collection of microfilms. See the complete list of links to digitalized manuscripts contained in the Lull DB.

A third section facilitates access to the complete texts of Lullian catalogues (that is to say, more or less complete lists of Llull's output), as well as inventories of early Lullian libraries which could be considered of historical interest, all compiled from the beginning of the 14th century to the present time.

The bibliographical section makes possible a variety of searches for authors or titles of any Lullian editions or anything written about Ramon Llull, whether in books or articles, from ca. 1476 to the present day. The individual bibliographical pages include a search engine permitting the user to find the titles in the Collective Catalog of the Universities of Catalonia, the Library of the University of the Balearic Islands with the other libraries included in its website, or in the library of the Albert-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg i. Br. In this same section one can find a listing of the bibliographies which have appeared in the journal Studia Lulliana from volume 26 (1986) to the volumes presently under preparation. In these last one can find the latest bibliographical information having to do with Ramon Llull and Lullism.

The section of New Features lists on-going improvements of the program itself as well as of its contents. That of Abbreviations contains a list of those of frequently used in the database. The section of Suggestions allows the user to contact the people responsible for the database in order to make suggestions, corrections o to offer recent bibliographical information.

The user can also consult a complete list of digitalized texts which can be accessed from the Llull DB, be it reliable editions of Lullian works, editions or works of some particular interest, or simply Lullian bibliography.

From the home page of the Llull DB, one can access information of a more general, popular nature on the figure and works of Ramon Llull as well as his historical context, all in web format.

The English-speaking user should perhaps be warned that the database itself was done in Catalan, with the result, for instance, of place-names such as Magúncia (= Mainz), Torí (= Turin) which might look unfamiliar, as well as incidental bibliographical information, such as "reimpr." (= repr., meaning reprint(ed)), and dates writen "s. XIV 2ª m." (= second half of the 14th century).

The Ramon Llull Database has adopted as its emblem the Lullian Figura Plena.

Statistics. Visits to Ramon Llull Database since February 2002.