Every country has its laws which determines what has to be printed on releases. One of the countries where this is most visible is Spain. Especially on older releases you can find one identifier that is of great help to date releases, namely the depósito legal identifier.
In Spain it is normal (or perhaps even mandatory) to deposit music releases with a library, similar to the Library of Congress in the US, or other deposit libraries around the world. Each release (not just records, but also books) is assigned an identifier that is printed on it, for example in the picture below:
If you want to you can go to a library and search for the item and perhaps listen to it. For example. Queen's Back Chat 7" can be found at the national library in Madrid in Sala Barbieri.
It is unfortunately not easy to unlock this information from the website of the national library in Spain (so they still have quite some work to do) and it doesn't seem you can search on the depósito legal number.
The depósito legal number has the following fields:
This is followed by the abbreviation for the name of the city where the item has been deposited. Then there is either a space, a dot, a slash or dash (or a combination thereof), followed by the number (which might contain a dot as a delimiter), then again a slash, dash, dot or space (mostly seen are dash and slash) and then finally a 2 or 4 digit number indicating the year the item was deposited (sometimes with a dot as a delimiter)
Of course, since humans typed it in there are many errors and spelling mistakes. Some that were found:
Other fields in BaOI are also quite popular to store a depósito legal, as are the notes.
Since there is an actual Depósito Legal field quite a few of the new releases are using the new field although almost every day a few releases are added that either have the depósito legal field in the notes, or somewhere else, either because the person submitting it copied an older release as a template, or because the person is simply unaware of the fact that the field exists, has adopted a certain routine and keeps using that.
Using my scripts I ran some tests to see how many depósito legal identifiers were used where the Depósito Legal field should be used instead, by looking at various identifiers and the Notes field. In the September 2017 dump (data until September 1 2017) there were a bit over 43,500 entries that needed to be fixed. In the October 2017 dump (data until October 1 2017) this was down to a bit over 36,000.
In Spain it is normal (or perhaps even mandatory) to deposit music releases with a library, similar to the Library of Congress in the US, or other deposit libraries around the world. Each release (not just records, but also books) is assigned an identifier that is printed on it, for example in the picture below:
If you want to you can go to a library and search for the item and perhaps listen to it. For example. Queen's Back Chat 7" can be found at the national library in Madrid in Sala Barbieri.
It is unfortunately not easy to unlock this information from the website of the national library in Spain (so they still have quite some work to do) and it doesn't seem you can search on the depósito legal number.
Depósito legal format
The format of the depósito legal number has been defined in Spanish law (the link points to the format as defined in 2011 and article 14 describes the format).The depósito legal number has the following fields:
- abbreviation of the name of the city where the item was originally deposited
- number assigned to the item
- year the item was originally deposited
Cities where item was deposited
Examples of abbreviations of names of cities where the items were originally deposited include:- M = Madrid
- B = Barcelona
- V = Valencia
- T = Tarragona
- BI = Bilbao
- Z = Zaragoza
Item number
The number assigned to the item is just that: a number. Typically this number has between 1 and 5 digits (mostly 4 or 5).Year
The year is either 2 or 4 digits. If it is 2 digits then if it starts with 0 or 1 it should be prefixed with 20, otherwise with 19. At the moment this is unambigious, as there were no records in the early 1900s and the depósito legal identifier only became common in the late 1950s/early 1960s.Recognizing depósito legal on a release
Recognizing a Spanish depósito legal identifier is not that difficult. Usually there will be some indicator that it is a depósito legal identifier, for example one of the following:- depósito legal
- d.l.
- DL
- dep. legal
- dep. leg.
- l.g. (for releases in the Basque country)
- dipòsit legal (for releases in Catalonia)
This is followed by the abbreviation for the name of the city where the item has been deposited. Then there is either a space, a dot, a slash or dash (or a combination thereof), followed by the number (which might contain a dot as a delimiter), then again a slash, dash, dot or space (mostly seen are dash and slash) and then finally a 2 or 4 digit number indicating the year the item was deposited (sometimes with a dot as a delimiter)
Depósito Legal in Discogs
The Depósito Legal field in Discogs is fairly new. Therefore there are many old releases that have the data, but in the wrong field. One common place where you can find them is in "Barcodes and Other Identifiers" in the Other field, with some text in the description field indicating that there is a depósito legal identifier in the field.Of course, since humans typed it in there are many errors and spelling mistakes. Some that were found:
- depósito degal
- deposito lagal
- deposrito legal
- depósito légal
- sepósito legal
- depósito lgeal
- depósito legl
- depõsito legal
- depótiso legal
- depásito legal
Other fields in BaOI are also quite popular to store a depósito legal, as are the notes.
Since there is an actual Depósito Legal field quite a few of the new releases are using the new field although almost every day a few releases are added that either have the depósito legal field in the notes, or somewhere else, either because the person submitting it copied an older release as a template, or because the person is simply unaware of the fact that the field exists, has adopted a certain routine and keeps using that.
Using my scripts I ran some tests to see how many depósito legal identifiers were used where the Depósito Legal field should be used instead, by looking at various identifiers and the Notes field. In the September 2017 dump (data until September 1 2017) there were a bit over 43,500 entries that needed to be fixed. In the October 2017 dump (data until October 1 2017) this was down to a bit over 36,000.
On September 1, 2017 there were over 43,500 releases with a Depósito Legal identifier that needed to be fixed. On October 1, 2017 this was down to 36,000.Several people have started the massive task of correcting these fields. How successful this is should be more clear as soon as the November 2017 dump is available.
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