Servei de Documentació i Accés al Coneixement (SEDAC)

by Author: This allows alphabetic browsing of the document author index. By clicking on a letter from the index, you will see the list of authors whose name starts with that initial letter. If you select an author, all that specific author's documents will be displayed in the repository.

Please note that municipal corporate authors are entered directly without Barcelona City Council appearing as the entity.          

by Title: You can find the titles that start with a given initial letter in an alphabetical list of titles.

by Subject Matter: This allows you see the alphabetical list of all the repository’s subjects. By entering a subject of interest, you can retrieve all the documents that deal with it. Please bear in mind that personal names and the names of organisations are also considered subjects when they are the topic of the document.

by Geographical Coverage: This presents an alphabetical list of all geographical locations (streets, neighbourhoods, districts, cities, etc.). By selecting the geographical location, users will see a display of all the documents that deal with or affect that place.

As they are the majority of Barcelona documents, we recommend you use this search field only when you are searching documents from a specific Barcelona location such as neighbourhoods, streets and districts. Remember that you always have the option to directly search one or more words in the search box without using the browser, which is slower.

Geographical search advice:

Streets are ordered alphabetically by their name and NOT under Barcelona. Examples:

• Can Clos, camí
• Corts Catalanes, gran via
• Corts, travessera
• Drassanes, av.
• Diamant, pl.
• Til·lers, pg.
• Xuclà, c.

Neighbourhoods are ordered alphabetically by their name: Example: Poblenou (Barcelona : neighbourhood)

Districts are NOT entered directly; they are found under the letter B for Barcelona, followed by the district by numerical order.
Examples:

• Barcelona. District 1. Ciutat Vella
• Barcelona. District 2. Eixample
• Barcelona. District 3. Sants-Montjuïc

by Publication Date: This is a list of all the documents in chronological order of publication.

by Term of Office: This provides access to a list of municipal terms of office. When you select the term of office you are interested in, the system will display all the documents that were created during that term of office.

Remember that the documents classified by term of office are:

• Agreements, minutes and agendas of Government Bodies
  
• Budgets and Accounts
• General reports
• Government Body Agreements
• Government measures
• Institutional statements
• Institutional videos
• Mayoral Decrees
• Mayoral documents
• Press kits and releases
• Reports (submitted to governing bodies) 
• Strategic plans
• Twinning Agreements
• Working documents

To perform a simple search, just write the term(s) you are searching in the box and click on the magnifying glass.

The search will take you to the results page. The results are organised by relevance, and 50 results are displayed per page. The system offers the option of changing the order and number of results per page.

You can limit basic searches using a series of operators:

• Inverted commas (“ ”) to search for an exact phrase.
• Boolean operators (in upper-case) to limit the search:
  • AND to find results that include all the terms.
  • OR to find results that include any of the terms, either alone or in combination.
  • NOT to exclude the written terms after this operator. These must be in inverted commas.  Example: "Women" NOT "Science"
• Truncation: To get results that contain words from the same lexical family, that is, with the same root. For example, if you search the root cultur*, you may get back documents with words like culture, cultural, culturally, culturelle and others. The truncation can also be put before the root, such as *pact: pact, impact, etc.

Search example

To retrieve documents on loneliness in childhood, you could perform the search “loneliness AND childhood”.

This enables you to search a complete text, a community or a specific collection in the Municipal Gazette or by municipal facility.

Full text search:

This searches terms inside documents.

Search example

If you search for organic food, it will retrieve all the documents that include these terms from both the description fields and inside the documents. If you add “ ” around the terms, it will retrieve the exact phrase.

This enables you to search by management offices, departments, independent bodies, consortia, foundations, public business entities and trading companies in which the city is a majority shareholder.

It allows you to retrieve all the documents made by the facility, but also, as from the 2023-2027 term of office, it retrieves documents that indicate the functions of the department (even if they are not the author). The search takes into account changes made to the name of the institution over time.

Search example

If you select the Manager’s Office for Urban Ecology, it will retrieve all the documents from the body or wich describe its functions (as from the 2023-2027 term of office), including the documents from this office’s previous name.

You can filter using the following criteria:

• Subject matter: This allows you to select documents on a specific subject.

• Time coverage:  This indicates the period of time to which the content of a document refers. It should not be confused with the year of publication. That is, if you select 2015, the system will show documents like L’estat de la ciutat 2015, which was published in 2016 but has information from 2015.
   
• Type of document: This allows you to select a specific type of document, like monographs, magazines and yearbooks, posters, etc.

• Geographic coverage: This enables you to select documents that deal with a specific geographical location, such as streets, squares, gardens, neighbourhoods, etc.

• Author:  This enables you to select documents by a specific author. It contains both individual authors and departments, companies, etc.

• Publication date: Based on this criterion, you can retrieve documents issued on a given date or during a specific time span. For example, if you want documents published between January 2019 and April 2020, select the month, the year and day in the calendar for the initial publication date (1 January 2019) and the final publication date (30 April 2020). This should not be confused with the time coverage of a document, or with its approval or creation date.
   
• Approval/creation date: This refers to the period of time after which the content of certain documents, such as decrees, byelaws, regulations and others, are valid, or to when a document was created.

• Language: You can select documents according to the language of your choice, as long as this option is available.

• Terms of use: This enables you to filter the results according to the possible ways a document may be used (copy, distribution, exhibition, making derivative works, etc.). Check the different types of Creative Commons licences and their features by clicking here.

• Validity (rules and plans):  This criterion allows you to filter rules or plans according to whether or not they are currently valid, that is, whether or not their content is still in force.

• Type of content:  This enables you to select the type of content in a document according to whether it is text, image, moving image (videos) or others.

• Type of municipal entity: This filter allows you to select documents created by a specific type of municipal entity, such as consortia, districts, independent bodies, trading companies, etc.

• Government term of office: This enables you to select documents from the actions of a government during different four-year terms of municipal government:
  • Agreements, minutes and agendas of Government Bodies
    
  • Budgets and Accounts
  • General reports
  • Government Body Agreements
  • Government measures
  • Institutional statements
  • Institutional videos
  • Mayoral Decrees
  • Mayoral documents
  • Press kits and releases
  • Reports (submitted to governing bodies) 
  • Strategic plans
  • Twinning Agreements
  • Working documents

The first box lets you limit the search to a community. However, if you want the search to be made in the repository’s entire contents, leave the box in its default position which is All BCNROC.

The second box lets you enter a word or combine several words, using Boolean operators if you want. Then click the blue Go button and the system will search your concepts in the metadata and the complete text of the documents.

If you want to specify in which metadata field you want to search for the word(s) you have put in the second box, you can refine your search by clicking on the Show filters button on the right.

A third box will open where you can select whether you want to filter by author, title, subject matter, content type, etc., and then select the coincidence options Equal, Contains, etc.

To complete the search, click the blue Add button.

The advanced search can also be made using Faceted browsing (Discover option).

Search advice:

By default, the search retrieves plurals, verb tenses, accents, etc. to increase the number of documents resulting from an inquiry.

Truncation: Use of an asterisk (*) after the stem of a word in the search displays all the words that start with this stem.

• Example: may* will also display mayor, mayor's office and mayoress.

Exact phrase: Use inverted commas to search for an exact phrase.

• Example: “Administrative agreements”

Boolean search: Use Boolean operators to find documents containing more than one term. The operators must always be entered in capital letters.

• AND limits the search by locating documents that contain the combined terms under this operator.
  • Example: policy AND economy will display all the documents containing both words.
• OR extends the search by locating documents that contain any of the combined terms. Important: If you search for more than one term and you do not enter any Boolean operator, the system will use OR by default. You can also use the + symbol leaving a space between it and the search words.
  • Example: policy OR economy will display all the documents containing at least one of the two words or both of them. policy + economy will display the same result.

• NOT limits the search by excluding any words written after it.
  • Example: parks NOT amusement will display the documents containing the work ‘parks’ but not any documents containing the word ‘amusement’.

We recommend you use brackets to group search terms together and combine them with several Boolean operators.

• Example: (government measure OR plan) AND (culture)

Geographic search: Streets are ordered alphabetically by their name and NOT under Barcelona.

• Examples:
  • Can Clos, camí
  • Corts Catalanes, gran via
  • Corts, travessera
  • Drassanes, av.
  • Diamant, pl.
  • Til·lers, pg.
  • Xuclà, c.

Neighbourhoods are ordered alphabetically by their name: Example: Poblenou (Barcelona : neighbourhood)

Districts are NOT entered directly; they are found under the letter B for Barcelona, followed by the district by numerical order. Examples:

• Barcelona. District 1. Ciutat Vella
• Barcelona. District 2. Eixample
• Barcelona. District 3. Sants-Montjuïc

You can use Discover from several situations. For example:

1) If you choose a Community, without activating any search you will find Discover in the lower part of the screen, displaying all the community’s documents classified by category and stating the number of documents for each of these. From there, you can choose what interests you the most and continue limiting the search until you find your final result. Facets will continue to analyse automatically, according to what you select. Collections are shown on the right side of the screen.

2. If you choose the Advanced search box and enter the word energy, 7,350 documents will appear.

Then, if you select the word Barcelona Activa, S.A. from the author section in Discover, you will see it automatically entered in the search boxes and the number of documents found will drop to 163. Notice how the facets have changed again according to the new contents found.

Every time you choose a facet from the side toolbar, a filter will be added to the search box. Filters can be eliminated by clicking the blue button with a cross in it.

You can search images according to their descriptive metadata. There are several search options:

By community and index (Browse option), choosing the community Images. You will then only search these contents. There, you will be able to limit the results of a search with Discover facets. Check out how to search by community and index

By simple search, entering the word(s) directly in the upper right box of the browser toolbar. Note, however, that under this option the system will search your concept throughout the entire BCNROC, so besides images you can also find other types of documents. You can always select the Images community to exclude other document types. Find out how Simple searches work.

By advanced search, clicking the magnifying-glass icon on the right of the browser toolbar. Choose the Images community from the first search box, and you can then exclude the other types of documents. Check out how Advanced searches work.

If you are searching images from BCNROC’s general search box, they are displayed according to the above-mentioned specifications.

However, if you are only searching photos or other still images from the image repository, you will have two display options: thumbnails or browsing.

Thumbnails:

Browsing:

You can browse forwards or backwards from here for all the images found in the search by using the blue back and next buttons.