IDEA
REDAKCJA
NUMERY
WSKAZÓWKI
LISTA RECENZENTÓW
I PROCEDURA RECENZOWANIA
KONTAKT
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Robert Degen - Appraisal,
disposal and supervision on them in Galicia until the
outbreak
of the First World War
Regulations about selecting documents for destruction
existed in the Austrian Empire as early as the beginning
of the nineteenth century. They were usually drafted by
local authorities who from time to time ordered removal
of old documents from their own registries and the
registries belonging to their subordinate offices in order
to find
space for incoming new documents. In 1832, an imperial
decree ordered general removal of unnecessary papers from
registries. At the same time, it instructed to preserve
any documents of historical value.
Ministries of the Empire followed the decree when they
issued orders about appraisal and disposal of documents in
their subordinate offices. The busiest in this respect was
the Ministry of Justice. All the regulations issued by
this ministry until 1897 were made without archivists'
opinion or assistance, and no supervision was provided
over
the process of appraisal and disposal carried out by the
historical archives which had been emerging since the
early 1860s.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the Austrian Federal
Monuments Office (Central-Commission zur Erforschung und
Erhaltung
der Baudenkmale) was established in Vienna and it became
the nucleus of the Austro-Hungarian heritage protection
authority which also took interest in the archives. It
employed heritage conservators and correspondents who
worked in
Galicia since 1888 and collected information about the
provincial archives, drew up archive inventory and
prevented
document destruction. National administration and
scientific libraries provided them with support.
In 1897, new regulations were issued calling for the
courts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to inform the
national
historical archives about their plans to destroy files. It
was also then that the general local authorities in
Galicia
ordered all the subordinate offices to inform them about
such plans by heritage conservators. In fact, only the
Archives of Castle and Land Records (archiwa krajowe aktów
grodzkich i ziemskich) in Cracow and Lviv were involved
in the supervision of documents disposal by the entities
that created them, because the vast majority of
institutions
planning to destroy documents at the time were courts.
Because of their financial situation, archives tried to
collect information about the files selected for
destruction by
corresponding with courts, sometimes they asked for the
files to be sent over so that the archivists could have a
look
at them personally, and occasionally their staff travelled
to the provinces to carry out an expert appraisal of
documentation.
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