The National Archives of Hungary (Budapest, 2006)
THE ARCHIVES OF SCIENTIFIC INSTITUTIONS - The Academic Archives (The Archives of MTA) by Diana Háy
BY DIANA HÁRY THE ACADEMIC ARCHIVES / THE ARCHIVES OF MTA ( HUNGARIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES )/ T he Hungarian Academy of Sciences have successfully dealt with maintaining the rising increase of documents. The statues of the society made duty of secretary general to preserve the archives of the Academy And as such worked under the supervision and constraints of the secretary general office for more than a hundred years. The documents were managed according to the archival philosophy prevailing in the 1930s and then were placed in the Archives of Manuscripts of the Library of MTA. The name of the material is Old Academic Archives and its reference is RAL (Hungarian abbreviation) These documents are still kept in the Archives of Manuscripts and they are available for research there. In the year of 1949 the Hungarian Academy of Sciences was re-organized. At that time the Academy did not work as a restricted scientific institute but as an organization that controlled the scientific life of the whole country and a center where research took place. Nonetheless, in quite a short time a significant amount of documents were accumulated and had to be looked after. The Presidency of the Academy in keeping with the traditions of the institution and the approval of the neighbouring countries decided to establish an independent Academic Archives (presidential decision no. 48/1963.) The Academic Archives started its work as an independent unit on 1 st January 1964, but under the supervision of the Library of MTA. Its tasks were to collect, hold and write up the academic files and documents formed after 1949. Until the decree-law no. 27 of 1969 the minister of public education declared the Academic Archives as a professional archives as expressed in his letter no. XVIII. 94978/1970 of 11 th November 1970. Today the archives are classified public archives based on the academic law of 1994 and the archives law of 1995. The number of the archives' employees is 3 full-time workers and 1 parttime worker. The quantity of the written material is 2360,05 linear metres as of 31 st December 2001. Most of the holdings of the Academics Archives contains the documents of
