María Luisa Conde Villaverde was a Spanish archivist who can be considered one of the most outstanding personalities in the Ibero‑American archival science of the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21th Century. She started her career as public employee in the "Cuerpo de Ayudante" in 1972 but she was destined to the Archivo General de Indias (General Archive of the Indies) (1972‑1973) and to the Archivo General de la Administración (AGA; Administration General Archive). In 1979 she joined the Corps of Archivists and she started to run the Archivo de la Delegación de Hacienda de Valladolid (1979‑1981) and the Central Archive of the Ministry of Economy and Finance (1981‑1986). In 1986 she was appointed AGA Director and ended up heading the center for almost twenty years, until November 2005. Meanwhile, she was also Director of the first and second "Campo de Archivos" Workshop School and she published the first general guide of the archive known as "Archivo General de la Administración, 1969-1994". She had been teaching Archival Science as associate professor at the University of Alcalá since 1992. For this reason, her professional activity is basically focused on the administrative archives, since she had carried out the direction of several central archives and of the intermediate archive of the Central Administration. Since November 2005 she works at the Unidad de Apoyo al Fiscal General del Estado (Unit of Support to the State Attorney General), where she is in charge of the Information Management Service. In the last ten years she has been working with electronic documents. Among the committees and the national and international working groups she took part in, it is worth to remember that she was the Coordinator of the Grupo Iberoamericano de Tratamiento de Archivos Administrativos (GITAA; Ibero‑American group for processing Administrative Archives), which created a Manual on the Ibero-American Administrative Archives published in 1996. Furthermore, she was a member of several commissions under the General Subdirectory of State Archives such as the Committee on the Archives Ruling or the Committee of Archiving Terminology. This last one edited a Dictionary of Archiving Terminology in 1993. She was also member of many committees of the International Council on Archives (ICA): Committee on Administrative Archives, Committee on Electronic Documents, and the Section of Architectural Archives. Moreover, thanks to the subcommittee of the Regulation 15489, she was member of DLM-FORUM Scientific Committee. In addition, she was chair of the Comisión de Normas Españolas de Descripción Archivística (CNEDA; Spanish Standards Commission for Archival Description). She is the author of numerous publications and collaborations in journals and monographs, her "Manual de Tratamiento de Archivos Administrativos" is a reference work in the whole archival field in the Spanish language.

En 1975 investigó en el Archivo de la Corona de Aragón como miembro del Cuerpo Auxiliar de Archivos.