General Library




History

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The introduction of ICT into Barcelona City Council began in the early 1990s as a strategy for improving public services and led to the publication of municipal documents in digital format, at first in a somewhat limited manner, and then, from the 2000s, across the board.

The City Council's General Library, being responsible for the dissemination and preservation of the publicly available digital documents, began to collect this documentation in a systematic way as it was published. Initially, these documents were organised by collection and saved in a repository known as DIGIBAB. They were catalogued and linked using MARC21 in the Barcelona Library Catalogue (CBAB) and the Catalan University Catalogue (CCUC). DIGIBAB was very limited and, over the years, has become technologically and functionally obsolete.

In 2014, in order to improve the knowledge that citizens have of municipal activities that are included in the public records of the City Council, to promote the exchange of ideas as part of knowledge access best practice, and also to contribute to the fulfilment of legal requirements set out by Spanish law 19/2013 of 9th December, and Catalan law 19/2014, of 29th December, both on transparency and good governance, and Law 37/2007, of 16th November, as well as Law 18/2015 of 9th July on the reuse of public sector information, the City Council decided to make the change towards a new institutional repository as part of the global Open Access movement that guarantees free access, interoperability and discovery of municipal documentation on digital networks, allowing the reuse of content by third parties. At that time, DIGIBAB contained 10,000 digital documents, accessible through the CBAB and CCUC catalogues, which had to be moved to the new repository. This collection, however, generally does not contain the associated CC licences.

On 23rd March, 2015, the Mayor, by Mayoral Decree, approved the Circular[Cat] that establishes the creation and launch of the new institutional BCNROC repository, and regulates a policy of open access to the public documents produced by municipal departments. They adopt the most open Creative Commons licences possible, depending on the content of the documents, in order to guarantee citizens free access, with the minimum legal and economic restrictions, and promote the reuse of content.

BCNROC and the guidelines for open access to municipal publications come into operation on 1st October, 2015. The body responsible for managing this institutional repository and promoting the policy is the Documentation and Knowledge-Access Service (formerly the General Library).

The departments responsible for drawing up documents for public dissemination have to self-publish on BCNROC, so that the documents are immediately accessible from the same repository, as well as from the various municipal internet channels, particularly, via the Open Government website.