Dr. Péter Balázs: Guide to the archives of Hungary (Budapest, 1976)
(Introduction)
The cited decree-law also empowered the National Center of Archives to propose to the Minister the declaration of the archives (collection) not embraced by the state archival network and owned by a private person or a body corporate a private archives of a national interest. The owner of a private archives was bound to preserve it safe and ready of use, to guard, to arrange and to manage the material according to technical requirements at his own cost. The Center exercised a technical control over the private archives. The decree-law also ordered that the Center may declare single records of special significance for historical research, not belonging either to archives or registry, pieces of historical value. The owner of a private archives of national interest was bound to inform the Center yearly on the activity of the repository. These rules of the decree-law were important for the defence and readiness for use of the ecclesiastical archives in the first place. As it is well known, the safeguarding and management of the material of Catholic archives and registries is ruled by some canons of the Corpus Juris Canonici (1918), they aim, however, at the safe custody in the first place. Although the Reformed Church issued an archival regulation in 1938 and also a guide in 1941, the war prevented their realisation. Of the archives of the Evangelical Church this period witnessed expert work in the Budapest Central Archives only. So it was the decree-law No. 29 of 1950 which made the professional working of these archives possible and the Center reached notable resufts, mainly in inventorizing, through the co-operation of the staff of the state archives. The decree-law ordered also the protection of the records still in the registries. According to its rules scientific and practical interests were to be equally satisfied in the management of the material of public organs and offices, and the safeguarding and custody of records of historical or other value, finally taken over by the archives, had to be secured. It was in the framework of the outlined rules that Hungarian archives began to be socialistic; finally on 1 January 1968 the state regional archives were taken over by the directing organs of the capital and the counties, the Executive Committees of the councils. The upkeeping and direction of the archives is entrusted to their Cultural Sections. Two years after the decree-law on the protection of archival material and on the archives No. 27 of 1969 and its executive government decree No. 30 of 1969 were issued, aiming at the settlement of several actual questions of Hungarian archives, or serving as a base for other legal rules, respectively. First of all these rules have laid the foundation of a modern management of
