Start Year: 2010 – End Year: 2012

Organization of documentation of Catalan exile: the archive of the Orfeó Català de México

For an experience of this type to prosper, many aspects have been taken into account: the resources available, both financial and human, good coordination of the project’s vocal team from AsF (in 2010 it fell to Salvador Cabré, and from 2011 to Andreu Gurrera), the involvement of those responsible for the Orfeó, the support of colleagues in the country, in this case from AsF Mexico, the capacity of the volunteers who move to Mexico to coordinate the project in the initial phase, the training and involvement of the people who carry out daily tasks at the OCM (digitizing documentation, describing documentation, etc.), and many other issues.

In a first phase, 1248 documentary units have been described with the NODAC and 1083 documents have been digitized. The oldest document that has been described dates from 1892, specifically a score, but the documentation described to date can be dated between 1907 and 1988. The collection includes a large amount of administrative documentation from the Orfeó, but also the correspondence of Catalan exiles in Mexican lands. After years of work in the treatment of the Orfeó’s documentation and the overall conditioning of the entity’s archive, the first results were presented in 2012, which are specified in the delivery of more than 20,000 images of digitized documents. They have been delivered to the Orfeó and the Generalitat de Catalunya to be deposited in the National Archives of Catalonia and the Digital Depository of Archives of Catalonia, with the aim of ensuring the preservation of the information contained in this important collection and facilitating access for those interested in consulting it.