Promote transparency and access to information

The Documentation and Knowledge-Access Service at Barcelona City Council (SEDAC) has the functions of a government library and meets the information and documentation needs of public employees and elected officials of the Barcelona City Council. The SEDAC library also guarantees citizens free access to the valuable documents generated by the Council so they can stay knowledgeable about city business.

SEDAC has taken a big step toward its strategy of global visibility with the implementation of WorldShare^® Management Services (WMS), which includes WorldCat^® Discovery. Both services allow the library to strengthen access and use of its collections, an invaluable source of knowledge about the actions, programs, and policies of the government of Barcelona.

Marta Rafales, SEDAC’s Director, explained, “Integration into OCLC has been needed to meet the challenges of a changing future and to enable us to respond to the demands of users with the cooperation and support of the international library community.”

“WMS contributes to improving the efficiency of SEDAC library staff and the Departmental Libraries of the City Council,” Marta continued. Instant access to a global knowledge network, thanks to millions of resources from other libraries at the local and international levels and OCLC's agreements with content providers, is indispensable to help the Barcelona City Council’s make informed decisions.

WMS also promotes transparency and access to public information for the local citizenship and for a global audience. SEDAC’s new discovery tool, BCNexplor@, uses WorldCat Discovery as its foundation. It brings together physical and digital information resources in different formats into a single container that improves the search experience of users. BCNexplor@ makes searching the SEDAC collection friendlier and smarter, saving users time and enabling them to browse from any mobile device at any time in any place they can connect to the internet.

“WMS reduces costs by eliminating efforts in routine tasks, and it allows us to discover the world as well as the openly accessible documents of the City Council in the same catalog,” Marta said. “Also, thanks to the cloud-based WorldShare platform, we have been able to continue to advance during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

A note from OCLC: To make this story more accessible to readers in Barcelona and the Catalonia region, we have provided it in Catalan in addition to our five other standard languages available through the menu in the top right corner of the page.  

Location

• Barcelona, Spain

Library at a glance

• Founded in 1983 with the aim to fulfill the documentation and research needs of the Barcelona City Council and to facilitate access to public documentation to citizens, institutions, and interested companies
• Collections include all the documentation published by the Barcelona City Council, including statistical data series, annual reports, regulations, government measures, magazines, publications, citizen inquiries, press dossiers, and urban photographs of Barcelona
• Open to continuous change depending on the evolution of society and the City Council