The photographic archive of the city of Barcelona Historical Archive: access to photographs

By Silvia Domenech (Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat. Archivo Fotográfico, Barcelona, Spain)

Ever since it was founded in 1920 the ACHB-AF has been actively engaged in collecting and preserving the photographic heritage of the city of Barcelona. Today it holds about three million photographs of all types, dating back from the beginning of photography up to present-day. In the collection you can find a wide variety of types ranging from daguerreotypes, ambrotypes and ferrotypes to prints on plastic film, autochromes or albumen prints. It includes large numbers of photographs related to particular events, such as the 1888 World Fair, the 1929 International Exposition and the 1992 Olympics, or well-known photographers like C.Clifford, A.Esplugas, J. Laurent and others.

In 1994 after an in-depth study of the photographic holdings in Barcelona City Council's various centres and services, the most important photographic holdings were put together in one single archive. The old photographic section of the Historical Archive of the City merged with the collections of the Photographic Archive of Museums, Officina Tècnica d'Imatge and Holding Olímpic, thus forming the Archivo Fotográfico as it is now.

There was a lot of work to be done at the time; the collection consisted of specific parts with different origins. About 80% of the photographs had never been sorted before. In September 2000 a policy document was launced, the 2000-2003 Photograhic Archive Viability Plan in order to achive a good level of organisation of the Archive to improve preservation and access facilities. As a result of this plan a Guide-Inventory of the Archivo Fotográfico's fonds and collections was made.

Basically the Archivo has three main lines of work: acquisition, organisation/preservation and access to information. In all three of these lines the issue of documentation, cataloguing and description plays an important role. The acquisition policy includes standardisation of documentation and legal procedures to be followed, the criteria and conditions for accepting photographs and the fonds and collections to complete the Archive's photograhic documentation.

From an organisational point of view the focus is on 'document groups', whether they are fonds or collections. Research on these groups is carried out on the basis of three values that a photograph can own:

• artistic value, providing a context with historical and bibliographical data
• documentary aspect, research into the concepts and iconography represented in the images
• technical aspect, identifying and appraising the photographic materials

From 1994 onwards the Archivo Fotográfico had used BIMA, a system that could also be applied to non-photographic materials. It could be used for catalogue level description, i.e. only single or compound documents could be described. Recently BIMA was replaced by the AIDA (Integrated Document and Archive Management) system. This system is defined by the series of procedures to be applied to documents in each stage of their lifecycle. It contains a single, homogenuous descriptive file for all existing fonds and document types on any descriptive level. AIDA basically conforms to the ISAD(G) standard.

AIDA has a standard file, which is divided up into four main areas, quite similar to the ISAD(G) structure; identification, description, administration and notes areas. It also allows multi-level description from individual to compound or fonds level.

Consistency of input is secured by three levels of control in the description:

• A first level through auxiliary or validated tables for fields which usually provide technical, identification and administrative information, e.g. medium, format and provenance
• A second level usually applied to fields that relate to the content. Supplementary descriptive tools are used like controlled vocabularies, descriptive standards and indexing standards
• A third level on all fields, which consists of a standardised check on the content of all fields

As far as providing access is concerned, the Archivo also documents information about consultations, exhibitions and publications.

More information
-Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat website:<>