You are in: home Start >>The Sacramental Records of Historical Diocesan archives

THE SACRAMENTAL RECORS OF HISTORICAL DIOCESAN ARCHIVES

1. Nature and scope of the Agreement

One of the most relevant successes for the set of proposals included in the Basque Culture Plan concerning the Archive and Documentary Heritage policy, has been structuring the lines of action in this field of work into an organic and coherent entity. In this respect, it does not introduce extraordinary innovations but it does define the priorities. It can be affirmed, in a certain respect, that it endorses and offers incentives to some of the projects which are already in progress.

In the statement for various action axes, it echoes the urgency of promoting two general policies.

  1. Digitalisation and massive diffusion of the documentary and cultural heritage in its widest sense.
  2. Democratic access to the Cultural heritage, in any of its natural supports, for all citizens.
  3. This is obviously a matter of related objectives which cannot be understood independently.

    4. Both sustain the guiding principle of all archive policies: facilitating direct access to their Heritage and its Archives to users, as end clients of all public policies and primordial objective of the policy in this field.

    For this purpose, work was started back in 2000 with the three Diocesan Historical Archives in the Basque country region. This choice should not be surprising as it refers to the Archive Services which best represent the two key elements for a project of this type and scope.

    This means that it involves:
    1. Promoting a project which benefits all citizens. In this respect, Documentary Heritage plays an important democratising role in so far as all citizens actively participate in the Archive sedimentation process and increase demand to use it for education, cultural or recreational purposes.
    2. Assigning additional resources which intensify the most urgent governmental strategies and objectives or those with the greatest social impact included in the Basque Culture Plan. A singular Project is presented within the non public Archive programme (which has been run with noticeable success for the last ten years), with undeniably positive social impact.
    Even if we estimate that people are aware of the project’s objective, it is still worth presenting it briefly.

    During the 2000/2001 period, the Culture Department started to work on these aspects, signing an agreement with the Dioceses of Bilbao, San Sebastián and Vitoria, to index and digitalise sacramental books in the parish stores concentrated in the respective Diocesan Archives and distributing the description instrument and the sacramental records indices from the aforementioned stores over the Internet. This Agreement continued during the 2002 and 2003 exercises.

    Signing a new agreement for 2004-2008 concludes and consolidates this project. As shown below, the specific objectives are:

    1. Creation of digital services in the Diocesan Historical Archives in Bilbao, San Sebastián and Vitoria.
    2. Standardised elaboration of documentary description instruments (multi-level description with ISAD(G), indexing according to agreed criteria and computerisation) for diffusion on specific websites for each archive service and using the Badator search engine on the Irargi website.
    3. Application of the ISAD (G) Standard to describing parish stores containing documentation prior to 1900, whose sacramental series have been used for digitalisation and are going to be indexed under this new agreement, taking into account the different actions which must be carried out beforehand in each case.
    4. Indexing the digitalised records in order to make it easier to recover images. The agreed indexing standards will only affect the records for baptisms, weddings and funerals.
    5. Association of the digitalised images with the sacramental records, resulting from the each archive’s indexing project. The images resulting from the digitalisation project can be consulted in the archive’s own research rooms.
    6. Progressive updating of software, websites and specific intranet for each Archive Service.

    Progressively, the indices for the sacramental records will be sent to each archive's websites and Badator. We are talking about approximately thirteen and a half million personal descriptive items, with the index of the annotations on 400 years of history’s baptisms, weddings and funerals. Taking into account that the Civil Register was created in 1870, the final result of this project will provide the complete historical census index for the Basque Country from the 16th century to the start of the 20th century (taking 1900 as the end date). Including them in each Archive’s website and of all of them in the Badator system site (from Irargi) will:

    1. Facilitate access to the documentation for the widest collective of users (who make up around 90% of total users) of the Basque Country Archives: citizens of all ages, status and condition who carry out research in order to recover or reconstruct their family history;
    2. Offer high quality statistical and historical information, which interests a wide spectrum of professionals: demographers, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, etc.
    3. Serve the exiled community, a very relevant collective within the recent governmental action. This collective is anxious for this type of information and already one of the main clients both for the Badator service and the three Dioceses’ archive services.
    4. Significantly enrich the aforementioned Badator service, giving it privileged status among European archive information servers.
    5. Increase the quality of the services provided by the three diocesan archives which have redefined all their archive-related policies, to integrate a digitalisation and indexing project among their usual tasks which is subsidised by prior agreements and the agreement which is currently be signed.

    If we centre on the specific characteristics which endorse the correct decision to establish privileged collaboration with these Archives for the Basque Administration, we can identify up to seven elements, whose combination make this Project an initiative with exceedingly high value and social interest. In the mid and long term, this will fully justify the important investment which has been planned:

    1. Proven general interest: not aimed at elitist or minority users
    2. Representative of the whole population: it reflects the social and collective life, meaning not an elite, authority or special group.
    3. Offering specific and original information; containing references which are neither reiterative nor present in other documentation
    4. Offering information capacity for a long period of time: documentation with a pastoral primary value, for which its historical life and sedimentation will continue for centuries.
    5. Wide territorial field: documentation which represents the whole Basque Country region.
    6. Easy and quick to use; documents which are not complicated in themselves, with easy access and easy to read.
    7. And finally, capable of implicating the user; documents which draws the ‘universal’ user closer to their heritage and generates their interest in preserving it.

      8. It should also not be forgotten that this project represents a very important investment which is going to have positive effects on different areas, both on governmental archive policies and on aspects with social, educational or cultural reach.

      1. It promotes universal access to a type of archive store offering universal interest and high social content.
      2. It offers citizens a service with high added value, permitting massive access (made possible by the internet) to documentation which is also of massive interest. This means documentation which is likely to appeal to a very wide range of users, in number and variety.
      3. It creates a pioneering technological action within the field of preservation and cultural heritage diffusion which is only possible from a mature sustained technological development programme; it thereby endorses an innovating prior policy, developed both by Irargi and by the diocesan Archives.
      4. It aims to create synergies, contributing admirably to the economic development of different companies in the sector and encouraging the cultural market to put work tools, information and wide ranging social development in the hands of their clients, the archive users.
      5. It forcefully promotes a change in perception regarding archives. By putting them within everyone’s reach, it invites citizens to become directly involved in preserving and appreciating the documents and heritage within their Collective Memory. This could easily be one of the pillars to invigorate social and educational cohesion which is so important for citizens.
      6. It outlines a project which, in the mid term, is in an ideal situation to mobilise economic resources from outside, energise unforeseeable social and cultural expectations or promote redundant technological impacts with a much greater influence on the environment that might seem apparent. The investment in this field, whose substance does not lie so much in the magnitude of the investment but in its adaptation to its functional field, is going to contribute appreciably to economic development in terms of developing the Information Society in the Basque Country.

      2. Investment, magnitudes and deadlines

      This agreement awards a subsidy to the dioceses of Bilbao, San Sebastián and Vitoria totalling 3,000,000 € for exercises between 2004 and 2008, inclusive, in order to consolidate the Digitalisation Project which, as previously mentioned, will consist of indexing and diffusing the records of baptisms, weddings and funerals prior to 1900 over the internet. These records correspond to the sacramental books in the Archive store for the parishes concentrated in the respective Diocesan Historical Archives.

      Depending on the projects presented by each Archive, the estimated total of records stands at 13,691,640 records of which 6,321,100 correspond to the Ecclesiastical Historical Archive of Bizkaia, 4,070,000 to the Diocesan Historical Archive of Donostia-San Sebastián and 3,300,540 to the Diocesan Historical Archive of Vitoria-Gasteiz.

      This multi-year subsidy will be distributed as a percentage, depending on the number of records estimated for each archive, in the following way: Bilbao will receive 46 %; San Sebastián 30 %, and Vitoria 24 %.

      3. Methodology and technical questions

      The digitalisation project started in 2001 is framed within the wider project of creating digital services for the Diocesan Historical Archives for Bilbao, San Sebastián and Vitoria in the measure that the digitalisation has led to redefining all the services and policies for the three archives. We can distinguish three phases in this project:

      First phase: 2001: Project definition

        The objectives for this phase were:
      1. Definition of the general project and coordination between the three archives to agree on common criteria, without forgetting the different starting situations.
      2. Integration of the project in each archive’s general schedule.
      3. Acquiring technical resources
      4. Creation of work teams in each archive and distribution of tasks
      5. Establishing methodology and criteria for digitalising and indexing

      Second phase: 2002-2003: Project implantation

        The objectives for this phase in each archive service were:
      1. Digitalisation and checking images
      2. Indexing parish records
      3. Creating websites and specific management systems for each archive (Inet Archive Management System in Bilbao and Vitoria, henceforth known as SIGA- and Electronic Management System in San Sebastian, henceforth known as SEG)
      4. Redefinition of all the policies for each archive: descriptive planning, diffusion of images, management of present and virtual users, preserving new supports.

      Third phase: 2004-2008: Project consolidation

      Before finalising the 2003 agreement, it was decided that the project needed to be reshaped and a new agreement signed which will facilitate new deadlines and new economic resources to be able to conclude and consolidate the project in the reasonable deadline of a five year period (2004-2008).

        This phase has these main objectives:
      1. Running the project to index the baptism, wedding and funeral records prior to 1900. Implementation of the sacramental record databases will permit optimum functioning of the implanted system and will make the project results visible to the wide community of virtual visitors.
      2. Diffusion over the Internet of the description instruments for the digitalised funds and the indexed records, which will be done by maintaining and updating the specific site with universal access, for each Diocesan Archive. As they are entered in each Archive’s website, these description instruments will be integrated in the BADATOR information system in the IRARGI site - Basque Country Documentary Heritage Centre.
      3. Updating the specific websites for each archive by indexing of the sacramental records.
          • www.aheb-beha.org

            • (Bizkaia Ecclesiastical Historical Archive)
          • www.elizagipuzkoa.org/artxiboa

            • (San Sebastián Diocesan Historical Archive)
          • www.ahdv-geah.org

            • (Vitoria Diocesan Historical Archive)
        1. Development of the archive management systems, SIGA and SEG, which, as well as offering internal development for the administrators of each archive, will allow virtual and present users of each archive to consult catalogues and sacramental records and request copies of the aforementioned records online.
        2. Implementation of the Digital Service in three archives so that the digitalised funds and the databases can be consulted using the intranet in their respective consultation rooms. The images will be associated with the indices drawn up by virtue of this agreement and available on each Archive’s specific intranet. As the indexing process progresses, each Archive's intranet will be updated with the sacramental records associated to the corresponding images.

        Each diocesan archive, without undermining its specificity and maintaining the ownership, control and management of its funds, has established its work itinerary and its temporary planning to carry out the sacramental record indexing (baptisms, marriages and funerals) for the parishes in each diocese with documentation prior to 1900 and diffusion of images in its archive rooms. Planning for each archive is carried out depending on the prior description and taking into account each store’s consultation statistics, given that the digitalisation and indexing project’s basic objective is to make it easier for virtual and present users to consult it.

        Reprography of the sacramental records can also be requested through the online services offered by each archive on its websites. Although the final objective is digital diffusion of the sacramental records in the three archives’ research rooms, whilst the indexing process is going on we will have to live through a transition period with both microfilm rolls and digital images in the consultation rooms, without forgetting the process required to adapt to new technologies for our, fortunately, growing number of users, characterised by their widely varied profile in terms of age and education. Implementing the Digital Service in the three diocesan archives has led to a series of actions and changes which have affected the usual tasks, obliging a redefinition of archivist policies to integrate digitalisation and indexing sacramental records among its activities. Implementing and carrying out this Basque Government subsidised project supposes, in short, a great challenge for the Diocesan Archives of Bilbao, San Sebastián and Vitoria which, without a doubt, have imposed radical changes on their organisation and a great leap in quality as a response to the challenge of virtual archive diffusion.

        We should insist that the indexing project is in progress. It is a laborious task which is going to be carried out progressively from 2005 to 2008, putting around three million sacramental records on the network every year, until the total figure of thirteen and a half million is completed.


    • | Tel: +34 943 762840   Fax: +34 943 765040 | Last update: 03/12/2008 @ 12:33pm

IBD INTERNET S.L.