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BADATOR

In 1989, IRARGI started collecting information about the Basque Country from archives in places other than Euskadi itself. This work focussed on the two archives containing higher quality documentation: the Civil Proceedings section of the Archivo de la Real Chancillería in Valladolid and the Consejos Suprimidos section of the Archivo Histórico Nacional in Madrid. The objective was to describe documentation never described before.

This project began in 1991 under the name of Badator, and ended in 1997 with over 40,000 card files. These files reflect over 5 million sheets of information related to the 13th-19th centuries on widely varying aspects of political and social history referring to all Basque classes, trades, corporations and administrations.

Likewise, thanks to the Municipal Archives and Private Archives programs, IRARGI has collected and standardized a great number of Basque Country archive holdings. This is an enormous amount of information serving to design the Badator Program, the aim of which is to disseminate all of the information collected from the Basque archive holdings in general or from others related to the Basque Country.

BADATOR provides information on...

. The Basque Country Archive Services: public opening hours, address, telephone number, name of the archivist or contact person.
. The Archive Stores which each Service makes available for the users.

Badator diffuses both the description of each document and the structure of the Store in which it is located.
To always have an exact idea of the context of each document and thereby make the most of its information potential, all the classification levels are described for the Archive store where it is preserved. This is a descriptive technique known as “multi-level description”, compiled in the international description standard ISAD (G).
Multi-level description means that each Archive Store describes each of the levels in which it is classified, according to the 7 levels which, from the most generic to the most specific, we recognise as:

Store
Sub-store
Section
Sub-section
Series
Sub-series
Item/dossier or basic descriptive level

In order to understand this principle, we must not lose sight of the fact that specific consultation documents are grouped naturally and progressively, according to the administrative or historical structure which has created them. The Archive Store section or series groups together all the documents for a subject or a function and it is therefore very important to describe each level. It guarantees that the user is always aware of its informative context.

How is the information structured?

Diffusing numerous inventories, involving both public and private archives, in a single server is only possible if they are standardised and if the information structure and description have been worked on using uniform criteria. The ISAD (G) standard develops an architecture which respects the original principles and original order of the archive store organisation. All levels of each Archive Fund are described, contextualising the user’s research at all times.
Badator is an intermediate which diffuses the information from a vast number of Archive Stores. The inventory which is received is our basic information source, explaining why it is quoted in all cases. It can refer to a manuscript inventory which is over one hundred years old or a database which has already been produced. Information is compared with the originals whenever problems arise.
In the event that the reference Inventory does not offer minimum scientific guarantees, then it is produced again.

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