Esbart Cátala de Dansaires (Catalan Dance Company): a project on the reorganization of the documentary resources

The Esbart Cátala de Dansaires is an entity that has been collecting a large quantity of specialized information on dance, music, Catalan customs, etc., since its formation 88 years ago. Its documentary collection are shared between the archives and the library. The former includes the  Capmany Archive that contains documentary, musical and graphical dance  references from the 12th century to 1942. The library collects printed  material, sound and video recordings of national and international dance, music, costume, history, etc. The need to be able to manage all of this information and to make it accessible to anyone interested in this area  has resulted in a project to discover an automatic system that would allow technical treatment and easy access to all of the material in the collection. When we began this project we realized that the existing basic tools available were totally insufficient. For this reason we felt that it was important to confront the task of not only organizing the resources, but developing the Dance Thesaurus, the Specialized Catalan Traditional  Dance Vocabulary and a Bibliography that referred to dance.