Diputació Barcelona safely preserved public data
Diputació Barcelona is a public institution that promotes progress and welfare in the Barcelona province. Part of network of 311 municipalities, it supports a range of cultural initiatives and city services.
The Diputación acts directly on the territory providing services and support (technical and economical), all of this in cooperation with the municipalities. It also collaborates in the management of several institutions, such as Museu Maritim de Barcelona, Centre de Cultura Contemporània, Institut del Teatre and others.
CHALLENGE
Ensuring data lives on into the future is critical as the information held by the Diputación supports the people’s rights, obligations, or activities in the public environment. The cultural assets of the cities are also valuable to future generations and need to be preserved.
In 2003, the Diputación established the Municipal Archives Network to encourage consistent management of local (documentary) heritage and undergo a digital transformation process. The network provided a single document management system, optimised resources for the city archives and enhanced the quality of services, facilitated the municipalities regulatory compliance, provided technical support for 82 cities and 145 municipalities adhering to the maintenance program.
With such an effective program of safeguarding written history for the present, Diputación de Barcelona also wanted to ensure the information would be safeguarded into the future. With much of the collection already digitised, this included ensuring the data integrity over time, accessibility and authenticity for future generations.
"With the complexity of digital world, the preservation of people’s rights in the long term is an issue for municipalities. Piql’s solution gives the cities a tool to keep the data in their hands, ensuring its authenticity and integrity, applying the policies, standards and best archiving practices given by Diputació archivist and IT teams."
SOLUTION
Diputació de Barcelona trusted Piql to digitally preserve its original historical records dating back as far back as 1845.
The project had a number of goals including the preparation of the preservation workflows, the selection documents for preservation, the metadata criteria for information retrieval, integration with existing applications and feasibility of the business case for municipalities.
Selected records for preservation included digitized documents and digitally born records of Plenary Acts from 1845-2005, Video-Acts from 2017 and electronic
records stored in the City Council Record Management tool (Gestiona esPublico). Unique documents were also preserved from 1867-2008 that describe key
events at LIinars such as the King’s Village Declaration and the Auditorium Project.
Able to manage all file types, meeting open source archival standards (both international and Spanish), never requiring data migration and guaranteed future access made Piql’s purpose-built technology an obvious choice. Piql technology can be integrated into any system or network and is now integrated with the content management system used by over 3,500 municipalities in Spain.
Diputació de Barcelona also chose to store their data in the safety of the Arctic World Archive.
FUTURE
The Diputació de Barcelona has already decided to extend Piql’s solution to another 5 municipalities. The project started early 2019 and will cover new Record Management integrations, different kind of cities and different kind of documents.
Diputació de Barcelona will also provide preservation services to its network of municipalities within a Framework Agreement, offering the full range of Piql’s expertise.