Olympic Barcelona, a platform for accessing information about the ’92 Barcelona Olympic Games and the Olympic movement in the city.
The Joan Antoni Samaranch Centre for Olympic Studies and Sport at the Barcelona Olympic Foundation, the Olympic and Sport Studies Centre at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the Municipal Archives of Barcelona together launched Olympic Barcelona, a project dedicated to preserving and spreading the city’s Olympic and sporting memory, coinciding with the official celebration of the commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games.
Olympic Barcelona brings together information about the respective documentary funds and collections of the following collaborating organisations: the FBO’s Joan Antoni Samaranch Centre for Olympic Studies and Sport, the Centre for Olympic Studies and Sport at UAB and the Barcelona Municipal Archive (a fund of COOB’92, HOLSA and OCSA), in addition to the personal Olympic and sports collection donated by Joan Antoni Samaranch.
This initiative, for the first time, offers coordinated services granting access to information from documentary sources about the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games and will be internationally accessible via one single platform. More than 11,000 books, 180 journals, 6,300 videos, 240,600 photographs, 45 linear metres of press dossiers, 6 linear metres of grey literature, 11,929 boxes of administrative documentation and 30,103 maps, allowing the user to discover the Olympic history of our city.
Via the online platform barcelonaolimpica.net, the user can access each institution’s bibliographical, audiovisual or archival fund on the main themes relating to the city’s Olympic and sporting history. Barcelonaolimpica.net also offers access to the Olympic digital collection that is being developed by the participating institutions, and includes studies, official publications and images about the games.
Olympic Barcelona also hosts the Joan Antoni Samaranch Collection, part of the COI President’s private library on sport and the Olympic Movement, gifted to the Barcelona Olympic Foundation to be placed and managed by the Samaranch COS. This significant collection, which brings together more than 5,000 titles, is supplemented by works about his life and person. The collection constitutes a central and distinguishing element of this project, and is complemented by the Samaranch fund housed in the International Olympic Committee’s archives.
The richness of the information about the documents and materials that the project combines and its range of coordinated services make it one of the leading sources of knowledge about the Olympic movement in the world, and positions Barcelona as a leading example on managing the documental legacy of an Olympic Games. With this project, Barcelona aims to be a pioneering city and a global reference for the management and use of the Olympic Games’ immaterial legacy and of sporting activity in the city.
