Special libraries of the government of Catalonia: current status

From the moment that the Catalan government (Generalitat de Catalunya) was reestablished, its departments and organisms have created libraries and information centres to support their activities. Some of these have collaborated since 1999 in a  shared union catalogue, Catàleg de les Biblioteques Especialitzades de la Generalitat (BEG). The current aim is that all such libraries be integrated into a single network of the Catalan public administration. In order to identify the centres and the status of each, in 2006 the Administrative Commission of the BEG prepared a questionnaire that was distributed to 114 libraries belonging to the Catalan government. The objective was to obtain the necessary data for:

a) Carrying out a study on the state of the art of the libraries, as well as an evaluation ofthem by applying quality indicators for libraries;

b) Proposing and planning for the incorporation of new centres into BEG, the Gener-alitat’s union catalogue, and studying possible solutions for incorporating libraries andinformation centres still not included in the new model of the Catalan Library Sys-tem.

In this article the BEG Administrative Commission explains the background of thestudy and the methodology used. The design and drafting of the questionnaire took in-to account the data that would be used for evaluation purposes and the indicators thatwould provide more precise information, adapted to the actual situation of the Catalanpublic administration. The distribution of the questionnaire and the collection of the re-sponses marked the beginning of the analysis stage that was carried out during 2007 andthat will be described in a future article.