The MANES schoolbook database is a collaborative initiative which currently contains approximately 35.000 textbook entries from Spain, Portugal and Latin America. The development and maintenance of the MANES database is the work of the Centro de Investigación MANES (MANES Research Center), which has its headquarters in the Department of History of Education and Comparative Education at the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), in Madrid, Spain. The MANES Research Center focuses on the historical study of school culture through the analysis of school textbooks.

Since its creation in 1992, MANES has developed a dynamic network, with important contacts and exchanges taking place, for the research on Spanish, Latin American and Portuguese school textbooks. The creation of a common research space has enabled studies on internationalization of schoolbook models, as well as comparative research on school culture in the Spanish and Portuguese-language world, especially after the Ibero-American countries emancipated from their former colonial powers. The construction of a single, practical instrument for cataloguing textbooks was designed for carrying out research on books that, despite their differences, share many noteworthy features. The MANES database has not only become a fundamental tool to get access to primary sources, but the elaboration of a common international catalogue for the Ibero-American space itself has risen many crucial topics that helped to better understand this particular kind of books, and has proved the inadequacy of restricting research on the subject within national borders.