RIET Documentation Centre

Documentation Centre of the Iberian Network of Cross-border Entities (RIET)

Located at Chaves, RIET's Documentation Center aims to specialize in Cross Border Cooperation, especially on the Portugal-Spain border, making a variety of documentation available to the public, both in printed and digital format.

In addition to its physical space, the Documentation Centre also aims to create a virtual space with online digital documentation, enabling content on cross-border issues to be made available and accessible to all citizens, speeding up the exchange and dissemination of information across the border.

Mission

The mission of this documentary unit is to research, collect and make accessible to the public relevant documentation of a cross-border nature, which reflects the experience in cross-border cooperation, not only of the member entities of RIET, but also of other entities of the Portugal-Spain border and of various territorial cooperation networks of the European Union.

Objectives

• Research, collection, organisation and technical document processing of all existing information on cross-border issues;
• To house all the information and documentation relevant to cross-border cooperation, not only from RIET members, but also from other entities on the Portugal-Spain border and from the various territorial cooperation networks of the European Union;
• To specialise in cooperation between Portugal and Spain, being a reference in territorial cooperation;
• To make the entire documentary collection accessible to the public in order to satisfy the information needs of citizens;
• Virtual dissemination of contents;
• Keeping users up to date with the Centre's bibliographical news, via the Internet, newsletters or bulletins;
• Keeping the database up to date.
  
  

Target Audience

The Documentation Centre is aimed at all citizens interested in cross-border issues, including scholars, historians, sociologists, academics, technicians, journalists, policy-makers from across the border, as well as all those interested in cross-border relations for political, study, research or other purposes, who wish to document their work in this area.

Documentary Fund

The documentary collection is essentially made up of official publications from the various entities that constitute RIET, entities on the Portugal-Spain border, as well as from various European Union bodies. Thus, there are documents in several languages, mainly in Portuguese and Spanish, but also in Galician, English and French.

The documentary collection includes monographs, reference works, periodicals and non-book material. The documentation that makes up the Documentation Centre is diversified, covering various themes, namely economics, employment, education, law, tourism, urbanism, politics, geography, history and, in particular, cross-border or territorial cooperation, thus reflecting the experiences of good practices that have been developed in the scope of institutional and economic cooperation between regions of border countries.

The technical treatment of the documentation is aimed at facilitating the search, retrieval and access to the information by the user. To this end, the international and national standards in force are used. In cataloguing, the ISBD (International Standard Bibliographic Description) format is being used.

For indexing, the EUROVOC thesaurus was used, which allows the establishment of a multilingual community terminology language. In terms of classification, the UDC (Universal Decimal Classification) was used, which facilitates the location of the document on the shelf, allowing the user free access to the documents.