ARHIVSKI VJESNIK 42. (ZAGREB, 1999.)

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C. Gränström, Access to current records and archives, as a tool of democracy, transparency and openness of the government administration, Arh. vjesn., god. 42 (1999), str. 79-92 portant to create inventories as soon as possible in order to determine the context. The theoretical discussions during the last decades have much more than before emphasised the need for establishing the context and not only account for the text. If this is not decided from the beginning, it is literally impossible to do it afterwards. According to my opinion, one of the most outstanding advantages with archival inventories is just its quality of showing both text and context as well as the structure. Regarding accessibility, this quality of describing the whole archive - that is all documents regardless of age, media and storage-place in a structured way (text and context) - makes archival inventories outstanding and this quality will soon be recognised. In a digital archival world the documents must be inventoried from the beginning, otherwise you will certainly loose important features of the text and context. Also; the public must have some means to have an overall description over the documents kept by an agency, both in the long run and short run. You can only try to imagine how searching tools can and will look like in the future. Of course, inventories must be computerised and their look and the methods of producing them can be developed but the main characteristics will be the same. Here, I believe that the archival profession can contribute decisively to make inventories in different forms, papers as well as databases accessible in the short and long run. Of course, these demands will be difficult to fulfil but nevertheless it will be necessary to face and produce solutions to these difficulties. Appraisal or destruction of documents is important regarding access. The simple truth is that once a document is destroyed, it is lost for ever. Destruction should not be executed on the expense of the right to public access or the requirements of researchers. It must also be kept in mind that archives/documents constitute an irreplacable part of the cultural heritage. Where secrecy rules can delay the access to documents for some time, destruction will do it forever. The same is true about copyright rules, even if time limits etc. in these cases can be debated. Furthermore, in the digital world, a question of what constitutes destruction in for example a database have become a matter of discussion. A more radical attitude has since long been adopted in Sweden, where it has been decided that the public shall have the same access possibilities as the creating agency. This means that during the life time, the document/database should preserve the same access level - the same potentiality - as from the beginning, even after transfer to the archival authority. Anything else would mean a restriction of the access possibilities, for which there is no support in the Freedom of Press Act, which in no way treats documents/databases transferred to archival authorities differently. At the First Stockholm Conference on Archival Theory and the Principle of Provenance in 1993, this question was an important subject for the debate in several of the papers. 89