What is

BCNROC is the Barcelona City Council's Open Access Institutional Repository, through which the Council provides free access to its public digital documents.

BCNROC is a tool for collecting, storing, managing, sharing, modifying and distributing these information resources and their metadata, facilitating research as well as their subsequent retrieval, access and reuse.

BCNROC serves the entire Council and functions as a single repository for other municipal websites that disseminate council documents.

BCNROC is interoperable with other national and international open access repositories, as it supports the OAI-PMH (Open Access Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) standards and protocols and enables the reuse of documents using the most open Creative Commons licenses and complies with the Dublin Core metadata standards to help facilitate the Semantic Web.

BCNROC gives the world access to the content of the digital and digitised documents prepared by Barcelona City Council that are subject to public disclosure. These include regulations, reports, projects, plans, budgets, government measures, surveys, videos, press kits, and other documents that outline the activities of the municipal government through time. It also incorporates Barcelona City Council's digital Documentation and Knowledge-Access Service (SEDAC) collections, a service set up by the Mayor's Office of the 12 May of 2015[Cat], continuing the work begun in 1983 by Barcelona City Council's General Library.

The collection repository is heterogeneous, with diverse content and document types. For more details on what it contains, refer to the Circular regulating its creation in the Mayoral Decree of 23rd March, 2015[Cat], BOPB 29-04-2015.

At BCNROC you will also find external documents, whenever they are of interest to the municipality, and have rights of use.

The majority of the documents are in Catalan. However, there are also municipal documents published in other languages including Spanish, English, French, Arabic, Bengali, Russian, Urdu and Chinese, depending on the intended audience.

Besides texts and audio-visual documents, BCNROC disseminates the digital photos of the Barcelona City Council.

The content and volume of this photographic documentation is in itself of great importance within the repository. It shows Barcelona's urban development from the 1980s to the present day and is divided into the following collections: General Barcelona; Buildings; Urban elements; Sculptures and monuments; and Plans and urban projects.

Here you will find pictures, maps and technical drawings, the earliest digitised from original positives, negatives, slides and drawings, and, later, originals from digital cameras. This image bank has its origins in the IMAGURB database, created in 2003 for the Town Planning Library and accessible to municipal users via the municipal intranet.

The photographs of Barcelona's sculptures and monuments can also be viewed from the Public Art , section of the Ecology, Urban Planning and Mobility Area website, where they are accompanied by a historical explanation written by specialists, as well as their location on the map of the city.

BCNROC allows you to view the images in two formats: the thumbnails and the images for dissemination, although SEDAC also features high-quality master files, which can be requested via the image request form. In addition, and if the user wishes, there is the option of viewing the pictures in carrousel format.