The University of Girona (UdG) is one of the 12 universities of Catalonia, an autonomous region in the north of Spain. Its mission is to contribute to creating and spreading knowledge; promote social equality, as well as the economic and social development of the region in its geographical proximity; and endorse the Catalan language and culture.

As part of its mission to contribute to the dissemination of the Catalan language and culture from its foundation in the early 1990s, the library of the UdG holds and preserves a special collections section. This section contains the personal libraries and archives of several relevant personalities from different fields related to Catalan culture, such as historians, writers, and philosophers.

The Prudenci and Aurora Bertrana Collection is one of these collections and also one of the first ones to become a part of the UdG library. The collection is a good example of cultural heritage saved at the last moment because, after Aurora died in 1974, her apartment was emptied to be sold. Fortunately, Professor Modest Prats, an eminent Catalan philologist and professor from UdG, was informed, and he reacted quickly. The books and manuscripts remained in a rubbish plastic bag, temporarily stored in a closet until the university and the library were officially created. Professor Prats then transferred the responsibility of the collection management to the library.

Since then, the collection has been inventoried, catalogued, and almost completely digitised, and it is currently accessible at the Barri Vell Campus Library, in the Legacy and Reserve Room. After all these years and strong promotional work, it has been augmented with other donations. The collection is currently composed of 1,200 books, mainly literature in Catalan, Spanish, French, and English; literary manuscripts, some of them still unpublished; newspaper clippings; and personal documents, including letters, photographs, and original drawings.

The collection is named after both father and daughter, but it was sourced from Aurora’s library and archive. By the time we received the collection, Prudenci was more renowned than his daughter, which is why we named the collection after both of them. Nowadays, Aurora has become as renowned as her father, and researchers are even more interested in her than in him.

About Prudenci and Aurora Bertrana

Prudenci Bertrana (1867–1941) was a modernist writer, journalist, theatre critic, and painter born in Tordera (Figure 1). He moved to Girona to study and remained there. In Girona, Prudenci got married to Neus Salazar and had four children with her, all of whom died except for Aurora (1892–1974). He worked as a painter and wrote art and theatre critiques in several journals until he published his first novel, Josafat, in 1906. The novel was a success but also highly controversial, as the plot involved a love affair between a prostitute and a bell ringer. At that time, Girona was an extremely conservative city, ruled by the church and the military sector, which did not like the book much.

In 1912, Prudenci was expelled from Girona because of a polemical article about a soldier. He moved with his family to Barcelona, where he remained until his death. In Barcelona, Prudenci worked as an art teacher and wrote articles for several journals, such as La Veu de Catalunya. His most remarkable works are Nàufrags (1907), L’Hereu (1931), El vagabund (1933), and L’Impenitent (1948).

Prudenci was an artist with a close affinity to the land and nature and with an anti-intellectual attitude. His literary depictions were significantly influenced by his artistic perspective. He lived his entire life with the feeling that his work was not valued.

Aurora Bertrana had always wanted to become an author, but her father convinced her to study music instead (Figure 2). She studied the cello in Girona, Barcelona, and then Geneva. During her stay in Switzerland, to earn a living, she founded a feminine jazz ensemble that played in the hotels of Chamonix. However, in 1924, she stopped her career as a musician to finally study literature in Geneva. In a radio performance, she met Denis Choffat, a Swiss engineer, to whom she got married in 1925.

The couple spent four years, from 1926 to 1930, in French Polynesia because of Denis Choffat’s work. Aurora began to write chronicles from her life in Polynesia and about the natives, especially about women and their social situation. The articles were originally published in the magazine D’Ací i d’Allà and were finally compiled and published as a book under the title Paradisos oceànics (1930), which became very successful.

After returning to Barcelona in 1933, she was a candidate for the Catalan congress election as part of the Catalan Republican Party in the first election where women were allowed to vote, but she was not elected. Aurora was involved in the organisation of cultural activities for women, and she also conducted many conferences about feminism, travel, and the Catalan language.

In 1935, she travelled by herself to Morocco to study Muslim women’s social situation, after which she published the book El Marroc sensual i fanàtic (1936). During the Spanish Civil War, in 1938, Aurora went into exile to Switzerland, where she notably survived by working as a translator and writer. Those years were challenging for Aurora: she had separated from Denis Choffat and was in Geneva on her own, and she even needed charity at times.

During World War II, she was engaged in several humanitarian missions; these experiences are reflected in her books Camins de somni, Tres presoners, and Entre dos silencis.

She finally managed to come back to Barcelona from exile in 1950, where she kept writing and also worked as a proofreader and French teacher. She wrote her father’s biography under the title Una vida, along with her memoirs. A weak and frail Aurora finally died in 1974 in Berga.

Opportunity

In 2017, the Catalan government officially declared the Bertrana Year to commemorate the 150th and 125th anniversaries of the birth of Prudenci Bertrana and his daughter Aurora, respectively. During the year, several exhibitions and activities were planned to disseminate both authors’ lives and works.

Given that Aurora and Prudenci were from Girona and that their collection was one of the first ones that came to the UdG library, all the staff were enthusiastic and motivated to participate in celebrating the Bertrana Year.

Since we processed the collection, we have worked hard to popularise it. Over the years, we have conducted exhibitions, lent some materials for external exhibitions and documentaries, written articles, organised public visits to the collection, and published promotional merchandise such as bookmarks. Therefore, we deemed it necessary to go further and actively participate in the commemoration, creating something from our knowledge of the collection and its makers, as well as our professional expertise.

We detected a gap in the study of Prudenci’s and Aurora’s works. Researchers have paid little attention to their journalistic production, which, especially in the case of Prudenci, was extensive. This gap was the seed of the project: we decided to create a database to compile both authors’ journalistic works. The main goals of the project were to create a useful tool for researchers and keep promoting both authors, their production, and their special collection.

Methodology

To meet our goal, we developed a working methodology. As a starting point, we searched for the authors in the bibliographies included in the publications and academic works to identify all their journalistic productions (Bertrana, 1911, 1936, 1965; Bertrana et al., 2007; Guansé, 1994, pp. 43–46; Lanao, 1989; Portell, 1999; Real, 2007, 2014, 2016; Tasis, 1966).

In the second phase, we studied the clippings and manuscript versions of the articles from the special collection. To our advantage, Prudenci and Aurora meticulously archived all the drafts and publications, which allowed us to study the creative process of the articles from the manuscript, the galley proof with handwritten corrections, and the published versions.

Studying these materials allowed us to detect some journals and newspapers where the authors regularly published articles. This was especially relevant in the case of Prudenci, who had regular columns comprising his opinion articles and literary and theatre reviews in several publications.

Once we identified the main journals and newspapers in which the authors regularly published, the staff involved in the project searched for full-text articles in the Catalan and Spanish portals that have digitised and made accessible numerous old serials under some national digitisation projects. For instance, one of the main sources was ARCA,^[1] a collaborative project coordinated by the Catalan National Library that gives access to the most relevant old Catalan magazines and newspapers.

All the findings were shared among the participating staff in weekly meetings to assess the evolution and make any necessary changes. Bertrana de Capçalera successfully involved all kinds of library staff, including librarians and administrative and IT members, as an example of a transverse and horizontal working organisation.

Technical Infrastructure

Bertrana de Capçalera had to be a zero-cost project, as no budget was allocated. Therefore, we had to design a simple tool with the available resources. Given the lack of budget, the initial idea was to add a simple tab with the references and links to the full-text in the collection webpage on the special collections portal.^[2] However, we realised that Prudenci Bertrana’s production was so large that the resulting webpage would not be user-friendly at all. Therefore, we decided to build a database with the UdG Library’s IT team. A dedicated database would be considerably more useful for retrieving the information according to several criteria and also for entering the references.

In the design stage, we considered the database requirements for the background and determined that it should be a web environment suitable for multiple simultaneous users, as well as easy to work with. The result was a record template with the most significant fields to identify the articles: author, journal/newspaper, title, URL, date text (date in the format that appears in the publication), formatted date (dd.mm.yyyy for sorting purposes), year (for sorting), number/pages, and series (if applicable), besides other internal fields for the database management. This work environment had a single table format that allowed rapid (simple) and advanced searches and enabled the sorting of the records by their creator, that is Prudenci or Aurora (Figure 3).

On the other hand, the user interface^[3] was split into two different tables, one each for Aurora and Prudenci. The displayed fields were title (including the article title and the date in the format appearing in the publication); publication year (for sorting); date (formatted and for sorting); publication (the journal or newspaper); numbering and pages; and series (only for those articles belonging to the same column, such as Ideari bàrbar in Prudenci’s case or Impressions d’una dona a través de l’Àfrica musulmana in Aurora’s case). The user interface allowed searching and filtering by any term, as well as alphabetical or chronological sorting by any field (Figure 4).

The article title included a link to the full-text when available. Whenever it was possible, we used permalinks, but not all the sources provided them. Shortly after the database release, the Catalan National Library, one of the main sources, changed the structure of the ARCA project server, and we had to manually change all the links in our database. We were willing to take this risk as the value of full-text access was worth it. In the future, it will also be necessary to keep checking for newly available full-text articles and adding them to the database.

As this information system must be accessible to the other information systems in a flexible and standardised way, we chose the following tools: the framework was based in RapidApp (Perl + Ajax + ExtJs 3.0) with a model–view–controller, and it was extensible.

The working environment, as mentioned before, was the web browser, which made its use easy and convenient for all users, as everyone was familiar with it. As for the professional roles, three different levels were defined, namely admin, editor (record entry), and user (view only).

The functionality of this work environment was the local information export, as data must be exported and published in the special collections portal, with the possibility to display reports in several formats, such as .txt, .csv, .xls, and .json. At the same time, data from other information systems could be remotely obtained.

The database was built with SQLite, a type of relational database contained in a library, with the C programming language and intended to be integrated into other programmes. To display information in the special collections portal, we used a REST API, a web-based software architecture for distributed systems that allows remote retrieval and processing of data to generate a searchable, filterable, and sortable table. The technological tools used were JavaScript, jQuery, and jQuery Tables.

Design

Given that Bertrana de Capçalera had to be embedded in the special collections portal located on the UdG Library website, which depends on the UdG general website, some technical limitations occurred. In 2017, UdG’s CMS was DotNetNuke, and we also had to adapt to UdG’s image and branding. Therefore, we decided to choose a table format for the user interface. Although this format was not the most attractive interface design, it fulfilled its function.

The only way to improve the user interface appearance and make it more appealing was by designing a header. The header was inspired by the newspaper covers from the beginning of the 20th century, with the title of the project written in a typical typography of that time.

The header fulfilled two functions. First, it was a branding strategy that allowed the rapid identification of the webpage. Second, as mentioned before, it served as a more attractive design.

Project Release and Future

By 2018, once the Bertrana Year was over, the database had reached almost 1,450 articles by Prudenci and 150 by Aurora. Immediately after the database publication in the special collections portal, several publications and academic works were written using its information (Pujol Prat, 2023; Rufi, 2017; Solsona, 2024; Vila, 2018). Therefore, it proved to be a crucial reference for researchers working on these authors.

Furthermore, Bertrana de Capçalera was a complete success as a collaborative and horizontal work model in our library, gathering staff from different sections and professional profiles. Therefore, we decided to replicate this working model in future projects.

In 2017, the challenge for the future was to keep growing and trying to find and identify 100% of the articles by both authors. We have not reached this goal seven years later, as of 2025, but the database already contains 2,202 articles by Prudenci and 174 by Aurora. Most of them have been provided by researchers who used the tool. One of the researchers even offered to volunteer at the library to add their findings to the database.

For the coming years, we will keep working to include all the journalistic work by Prudenci and Aurora Bertrana in the database and to add new available links to full-text articles. During 2023, the clippings from the collection were digitised and are now available as well.

Regarding the metrics, in 2023, Bertrana de Capçalera received 870 visits, which is a significant number for a local and specialised collection. Therefore, this humble success encourages us to keep creating new projects related to our special collections.

References

Further Readings

Abstract

The University of Girona (UdG) Library has undertaken an innovative initiative to promote and preserve the Prudenci and Aurora Bertrana Collection, a major piece of Catalan cultural heritage. This collection comprises over 1,200 books, manuscripts, letters, photographs, and personal documents and highlights the contributions of Prudenci Bertrana, a modernist writer and critic, and his daughter Aurora Bertrana, an author, feminist, and chronicler. To commemorate the Bertrana Year in 2017, the library launched Bertrana de Capçalera, a zero-budget project that involved digitising and cataloguing the authors’ extensive journalistic production. Using a bespoke database and collaborative methodologies, the initiative has created a research tool with over 2,300 articles available for academic use. Despite challenges such as limited funding and evolving digital infrastructure, the project has significantly advanced the accessibility and study of the Bertranas’ work, demonstrating the library’s commitment to preserving cultural heritage and fostering scholarly collaboration.

Keywords

Catalan literature; Catalan cultural heritage; Prudenci Bertrana; Aurora Bertrana; Bertrana de Capçalera project; Journalistic production database; Collaborative library initiatives; University of Girona Library; Special collections