ARHIVSKI VJESNIK 42. (ZAGREB, 1999.)

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P. Cadell, Financing of archives, Arh. vjesn., god. 42(1999), str. 93-102 The second reason for such a variety in funding systems stems from differing requirements — which is really another aspect of what I have just said. In Scotland from very early times there was a heavy emphasis on centralisation, on the placing of all records, particularly those of the law courts šboth national and local), and those relating to land tenure, in a central repository in Edinburgh. Indeed the first purpose-built archive building to deal with these records was constructed in the Castle at Edinburgh in 1540-42. In England on the other hand the national archives have always concentrated on a more closely defined collection of the records of central government. In Germany and Switzerland where a federal government links a group of powerful states of cantons, the Federal Archives are at a much higher level. These varying requirements - and all gradations in between - have their effect of funding. And then there are different sensibilities, essentially connected with the communicability or non-communicability of information. I suspect that it as more expensive to run a system in which there is complete Freedom of Information as in Sweden, than to run the more closed systems of France or the UK, for example. I may be wrong about this; the statistics for what they are worth give no indication one way or the other. But once more there must be an effect on the cost of running the organisation. National archives are responsible for widely differing ranges of ministries. The report Archives in the European Union published by the European Commission in 1994 has a very interesting table showing how the (then) 12 countries of the Union looked after their archives. Only in The Netherlands did the national archives have complete control over the records of all aspects of government including the legislature. For the others, the variation was enormous, though none - like Singapore - also ran the national museum. Finally the extent to which the national archive service is responsible for archive services at lower levels as it is to some extent in France, and in South Africa and I believe in some cases in Russia, has a very obvious effect on the funding required for its day to day running. One could go on at great length about the way in which national archives differ from each other, and as a consequence about the way in which their funding differs. One thing however is clear, and that is that no archive service can operate without some form of substantial government grant. In this if nothing else archive services clearly resemble each other. The size of this grant varies as I have suggested according to the responsibilities of the archive service, and also according to the amount of revenue that the archive can make from various value added services, but it nonetheless accounts generally for over 90% of the running costs of the service. I should like to consider for a moment the services that an archive can reasonably sell before coming back to the level of central government support that it recei97