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ABOUT US

Our story
Letra capital "C"

With the creation of the Ministry of Culture in 1977 and the establishment of democracy in Spain, the National Archives Administration was incorporated into the new ministerial department, which inherited the competencies of the Ministry of Education and Science, producing several significant changes in the Spanish archive policy.

One of these changes was the creation of the Archives Documentary Information Centre (CIDA) through the Royal Decree 2258/1977, of 27 August, on the organic structure and functions of the Ministry of Culture Nueva ventana. This represented a major innovation at international level since, at that moment, no country offered a documentation centre specialised in archives of these characteristics.

A year later, the Ministerial Order of 7 August 1978 on the structuration of the Documentary Information Centre Nueva ventana assigned its functions: the implementation of an archival information system to coordinate both the information aspects of the Spanish Documentary Heritage and the bibliographic information on the professional archival literature.

The Law 16/1985, of 25 June, on Spanish Historical Heritage Nueva ventana established that the Spanish archives system was constituted by the archives and the technical character services related to them. Thereafter, the National Archive System will be composed of three fundamental pillars:

  • The national archives network, which will be administered by the Ministry of Culture and Sport, composed of eight general archives and one central archive.
  • The administrative unit responsible for the archive policy, i.e., the Sub-Directorate General of National Archives, currently ascribed to the Directorate-General of Fine Arts.
  • The two technical support centres: the Document Reproduction Service (SRD), responsible for the digital preservation of documentary heritage and, the Archives Documentary Information Centre (CIDA), involved in the promotion of documentary heritage and archival standardisation.

From its foundation until 2009, the Archives Documentary Information Centre was located in Santiago Rusiñol street in Madrid, but was subsequently moved to the current facilities in the General Archive of the Administration (AGA) in Alcalá de Henares (Madrid).

After more than 40 years of existence, the CIDA is, nowadays, a multidisciplinary documentation centre, in which archivists and librarians work collaboratively with the objective of fulfilling the information demands of both internal and external users, providing them with the services it produces through Internet searches.

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