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The Documentation Centre is a depository of FC Barcelona’s historical legacy

The Documentation and Study Centre (CDiE) is an information unit specialised in FC Barcelona and sports. It provides a comprehensive service to the club's different departments and also has a research area open to members, researchers and the general public.

The CDiE is a depository of the club's historical legacy that stores and archives its documentary heritage, ensuring its preservation and dissemination through research.

It has a reading room, archive, library and newspaper collection, and at its new 100 m² site it holds more than a thousand books on sports themes (600 of which are entirely about Barça), 280 periodicals, about 7,000 archived files and 1.5 million photographs.

Documentation Centre

Documentation Centre

History

Given the need to preserve FC Barcelona’s century-old legacy, the Centre de Documentació Barcelonista was created in 1994 at the initiative of the then board member and delegate for culture, the historian Jaume Sobrequés i Callicó. This new body was organically linked to the Museum and took responsibility for documenting the club’s administrative files.

This was the first time in Spain that a sports club had created a documentation centre that was open to researchers and scholars alike. It was founded in order for the club’s documentary heritage to have a space of its own, where it could be deposited and viewed, and would soon become the service of reference to cover needs for information, documentation and historical advice within the club.

Centre de Documentació Barcelonista

Centre de Documentació Barcelonista

It was from 2006 when, as part of the general mood of professionalization within the club, the centre embarked on a new era, this time linked to the Communication Department, and was renamed the FC Barcelona Documentation and Study Centre (CDiE). This change was not merely aesthetic, as it also came with the will to be a driver for research and dissemination of Barça history. The CDiE aims to serve as a modern information and resources unit. The increasing weight of ICTs and the productive and communicative needs derive thereof meant the CDiE needed to evolve and to make the necessary adaptations to the Digital Era. An additional intention was to boost the collection by implementing a strategy to procure new documentary archives, such as Horacio Seguí’s photographic archives and the personal fund of President Agustí Montal i Costa.

Finally, the construction work on the future Espai Barça led to the transfer of the CDiE to a new site in April 2019. It was moved from the second floor of the Museum, inside the Camp Nou stadium, to be located at number 65, Travessera de les Corts, on the perimeter of the FC Barcelona grounds. This change has been used to optimise the work and viewing area, as well as the area used for archive storage, meaning that the documents are now kept in adequate physical, environmental and security conditions.

Força Barça
Força Barça

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