Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Staatsarchivs 39. (1986)
Archive Buildings and the Conservation of Archival Material. An Expert Meeting, held in Vienna, Austria October 30 - November 1, 1985 - BUCHMANN, Wolf: Planning an Archive Building. The Cooperation between Architect and Archivist
206 Archive Buildings a) Number of the rooms: in the list for the Bundesarchiv, the so-called „Raumbedarfsplan“, 200 rooms have been approved. This does not correspond to the actual number of rooms in the building, because to give one example, several rooms have been subdivided: no. 73, a repository for (paper) records with 10.000 square metres, was split up for security reasons into twenty separate rooms with 500 square metres each. b) Number of staff members: according to the “Raumbedarfsplan” (see fig. 1), 186 staff members will work in the new building. The number in column 3 indicates the number of staff members working in each room. c) A very brief description of the purpose, for which the rooms will be used. d) The size of the rooms in square metres: two different columns (5/6 and 7/8) on the form are available for the size of the rooms. The first column is reserved for office rooms. The size for that kind of room is prescribed in general regulations for the public administration, and depends on the position of the employee: 30 square metres for the head of a division, 18 square metres for the head of a branch or section. Only 12 square metres would be available for archivists of the „gehobener Dienst“, i. e. without a university degree. Arguing from the fact that an archivist, independent of his qualification, always has to work with archival material, which occupies at least two or three shelf metres in his office, it has been possible to secure a decision, that 15 square metres were accepted as the minimum size for an archivist’s room. - General regulations cannot exist for non-office rooms: they have to be planned according to the needs of an archives. From the archival point of view, priority should be given to the space in the repositories to ensure that a reserve for incoming records will, be available for at least the next fifteen to twenty years. The draft of the “Raumbedarfsplan” of the Bundesarchiv was discussed with the architect, the Bundesminister des Inneren (Federal Minister for the Interior), the Bundesminister für Finanzen (Federal Minister of Finance) and the Bundesminister für Raumordnung, Bauwesen und Städtebau (Minister in charge of all federal buildings projects). A first version of the “Raumbedarfsplan” was approved on May 8th, 1980 with 20.996 square metres. About two years later an additional 2.000 square metres were accepted as repositories to store movie films. As a result of these decisions, about one third of the whole space in the new Bundesarchiv building has been devoted to the movie film archives; two thirds are available for storing and handling (paper) records and other archival material (maps, tapes, posters, pictures). The size and equipment of the areas mentioned do, of course, depend on the
