ARHIVSKI VJESNIK 42. (ZAGREB, 1999.)

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P. Cadeil, Financing of archives, Arh. vjesn., god. 42 (1999), str. 93-102 the private sector, and thus cease to be a financial charge on government is no longer a direct government responsibility. Those of you who attended the IC A Round Table in Haarlem in 1991 will recall the extremely interesting position paper that our Dutch colleagues put before us. They set out a theoretical scenario in which the national archives would be financed by payments from the ministries whose papers they housed. The proposal was rejected because it was considered that a ministry made to pay for an archive service would be almost certain to look for cheaper accommodation than that offered by the national archives itself, and that as a consequence the documents produced by these ministries would be put at risk. As I say the proposal was rejected for good reasons but not because it was a complete impossibility. In Costa Rica the archives used to be funded out of a tax on cheque books and on the proceeds arising from the sale of revenue stamps. This was because - perhaps uniquely - the archives used to depend on the Ministry of Finance, because when they were first set up it happened to be the Minister of Finance who was interested in archives. For many years this resulted in an extremely well funded archive service. In Costa Rica they now do things more conventionally. These are two extreme positions, but in the financing of national archive services every point on the spectrum in between is represented. Why should there be such variety? I think we must recognise that a standard pattern was never likely to develop naturally. After all, in many countries, especially in Europe, the National Archives are actually the oldest recognisable department of the administration of government. This is certainly true in Scotland, and I suspect that a similar case could be made for the national archive services of many other countries. The need for a national service was widely recognised, and the archive itself was set up in each country in response to a particular need, at a particular time and within particular administrative and financial constraints. In each country it was also of course unique. Countries may have archives at different levels -federal, state, regional, local etc - and in some countries there are ministries which do not place their records in the national archives, but there is always a central national archive recognised as such. However because it is unique, it has no standard of comparison. It is only in comparatively recent times - really only since the foundation of the ICA, that national archivists have begun to meet with any regularity, and meetings of colleagues at lower levels are an even more recent phenomenon. We have had a relatively short period to compare our ways of doing things; if we were starting from scratch we might look around and take the French, or the English, or the Croatian model, but our archive services already have an existence; we have grown used to them in their current form, and in that form they provide us with the service we believe we need. 96