A Hajdú-Bihar Megyei Levéltár évkönyve 18. 1991 (Debrecen, 1991)
Műhely - Papp József: Debrecen város mikrofilmtára és a helytörténetírás
THE MICROFILM LIBRARY OF DEBRECEN AND REGIONAL HISTORIOGRAPHY József Papp The repository of house registers of the building authority in Debrecen is a collection of documents, which has been growing continuosly for about 110 years. Micro filming — which was necessary to introduce because of the problems caused by the two world wars and the obsoleteness of storing and retrieval — besides its utilization in the office and technical work provided a unique source of information for regional historiography. The data clusters, consisting of the street names and numbres and the topographical lot numbers as the basic structural units, give an unparalleled possibility for the researchers as the documents of about a hundred years referring to a given place (concerning building activity, demolition dividing the ground-plots etc.) can be found in one unit. And the reference numbers help us towards other directions of research (archive, landed property register office, judicial courts, tax office etc.) Another irreplaceable source of research in the possession of the microfilm depository of plans is the „real estate inventory of the royal free borough, Debrecen” together with its supplements (real-estate register-books). The well-organized collection, which abounds in general and detailed data, gives authentic information about the working of the town’s property from 1924. It contains the detailed description of the real estate, the contracts concerning its exploitation, economical data etc. A supplement to this collection is the 500 copies of cadastral maps, which show the whole administrative area belonging to the town (from the river Tisza through the Hortobágy to Vámospércs) on the basis of an engineer’s local inspection in 1911. 179
