Back Home	Seminar on Records and Archives in Society
Course This Week Past Readings History Archives Projects	Silvia Hansman, HIST 0647, Spring1999 European Experience in Protecting and Preserving Local Records Posner,Ernst. "European Experience in Protecting and Preserving Local Records." Chapter 8 in Archives and the public interest: Selected essays by Ernst Posner, edited by Ken Munden, 107-13 WashingtonDC: Public Affairs Press,1967. The paper was presented at the 1940 Conference of the American Library Association. It summarizes the main trends in European policies for preservation of local records at that moment. This policies were developed after the importance of local records increased as consequence from the shift of historical interest from political history to the study of cultural, social, and economic problems. Central state archive versus local custody: Only in Denmark and Scotland the local records are normally transferred to the custody of the state archives. Most other countries tend to leave local records to the care of local authorities to make the records available to local historians and to preserve the meaning they have in their sphere of origin. Direct state regulation: State supervision stimulates the interest and the responsibility of the local archives. In Holland local communities must preserve their archives in appropriate storage rooms. If abuses are noted by the inspector are not corrected within the prescribed time, the community is fined and its archives are transferred to the state archival establishment. On the other hand, if local archives fulfill certain conditions, records of branches of state organizations that ordinarily would go to the state archives may be deposited in local repositories. Indirect state supervision: This system has been very effective in the Prussian Rhine Province, where communities did not like state interference and state archivists met with difficulties when attempting to help the communities with their archival problems. A joint organization of the State Historical Society and the local government agencies acts through the "archives advisory agency" of the province. The archives advisory agency employs one or two trained archivists, who travel from town to town giving advice but also helping in the arranging and description of records. System of local archives curatorship: The system originated in Baden (1883) and extended to other parts of Southern Germany. The State Historical Society of Baden appointed archives curators for each jurisdiction in the country. They investigated the physical situation and the contents of the collections in their jurisdiction and reported on them. At the annual conferences of the curators a program for arrangement and description work was discussed an adopted. State supervision and archives curatorship supplement each other. As state supervision is intermittent, archives curatorship supplies a more continuous supervision. This system enlists the help of the historically minded people in a district. Curators are mostly teachers, librarians, ministers, local historians and university professors. They receive no compensation except traveling expenses. They are required to make regular inspections and to report to the curator of a larger district, to the state archives or the archives advisory agency. The creation of local archive centers: In some cases the communities can not bear the expenses of preservation. In England this was solved by establishing local record offices in town halls and county libraries that receive the records of rural communities, smaller towns, semi-public and private papers. This offices are managed by trained archivists, and it is their own wish to be inspected regularly by the Public Record Office in London. .