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 ?

New opportunity, looking for a new source

Today I have spent only one hour in the Archive of the Vallès Oriental region.

The documents Im tracing there are the local magazines 1979-1991, expecting that the new governments are published in such kind of local papers, most of them owned or issued by the municipalities.

I could retrieve a lot of information, from the age when not only Internet was not existing, but also the computers were available for a limited set of population

Last day fishing in Barcelona

As it happened in Tarragona, no one single municipality of the Barcelona province took care of publishing the composition of the local governments in 1979 nor in 1983.

This means that I'm dependent on the kindness of the city archive's responsibles.

In fact, the people in the Archive of the Diputació de Barcelona, the ones reponsible for the daily publication of the province official gazette, have been always very kind and helpfull, carrying up and down the heavy volumes of the archive. So it's a pitty that my work there is over

This picture is from inside, where I was working

This is the building of the Historical Archive








Well.... I will have to contact each municipality, one by one..... boooooring!

Christmas lemon tree

Who's complaining about the climate change ?

Here we are, mid December, wearing t-shirts. We have to complain because of the unpredictible future effects, but we would agree to leave it as it is!

Santa Claus is coming to town, again

Twelve months since I posted the picture of the kitchen after the Christmas lunch.

A lot has been done, but still a lot to do. As a summary of the year I can state that the pace of the projects is slower than the worst scenario that I could predict.

Capturing the information is a real issue, giving value to the project, but transforming it in a boring stream of data collection.

It has been a good option to do it on my own, having the possibility of discovering unexpected coalition agreements, opening new options for research, but at the same time, this option is slowing down the evolution of the project

My supervisor is expecting to get the available data, collected and sorted in one month time, but I'm afraid that I will need, at least, two more months, till the end of February 2012.

Did you ever heard about "el caganer" ?

For detailed information, please follow : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caganer

As matter of fact:

A logical name for a Social Affairs Councillor is Mercy ( Misericòrdia in Catalan )

Such things happen in Tarragona

Again, in Falset 1983, a Councillor for Youth affairs and Cemetery, a personal point of view about life.