Last day of March

Unfortunately I have to work every day, and this is delaying my research :-)

Last chance: Using the phone to call some municipalities, the ones with less information collected. Very promissing. The responsibles of the archives comment on the interest of my research and commit to send the missing information. One week later the truth comes up. Difficulties, time constraints, no way....

Some of them, extra kind, Parets, sent by post, Sant Joan de Vilatorrada to be picked at the City Hall desk, but the majority, again.... unacceptable: Sant Cugat, Badalona, they need an official request to be stamped at the information desk of the Municipality, in person.

Bureaucracy for the low performing administration. One must drive to knock on Heavens door if needed !!

It is because they believe they are God, when they are servants instead !

GRRRrrrrrrr !

February is gone with a heavy backpack

February the 29th, an exceptional day, I attended a presentation of the database created and maintained by the ICPS,

I was sad, very sad, because as long as they were talking about their database, I saw my database was dead. They claimed to have THE complete data set, including ALL the information about the results of the elections in the catalan municipalities since 1979.

At the end of the day I could accept that. at least, this would help me to finish the field work and start analyzing the records.
Yesterday I could check, for the first time, the information about some municipalities, after the elections of 1979.

The first one already brings a disappointment: while I recorded a total of 9 councilors for a city, they limit to 6. In their data base there is no mention of the party name, because they use "others", while in mine I have the complete name of the party. One of the councilors they are missing is the "second Mayor".... and so on.

I don't know if I'm happy or sad.

Happy because of the quality of my database, but sad because their information will not simplify my work 

Dragon Khan

 Up, down, uuuuup, doooown. This is not only the evolution of the Dragon Khan, but also the administrative organization and coherence of the official archives.


I would expect, from the regional archives, spreaded along all the catalan territory, receiving the same kind of public funds, depending of the same governmental department, a basic standarization level in terms of available kinds of documents.


I got a lot of information from the one in the Vallès Oriental, so I have sent e-mails to the ones in Baix Llobregat, Maresme and Vallès Occidental, asking if they could provide me with local journals or magazines from the year 1979 till 1987

I received today the answer from the one in Terrassa ( Vallès Occidental ): they don't have such kind of documents in their archive.

How can this be possible ?. Who's deciding whats going to be the content of the Archive. Is it really an official place, having a clear archive policy ? Is there a policy ?