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 - DUCHEIN, Michel: Introduction
Introduction 199 positories. By 1939 or thereabout, archive buildings tended to have a rather utilitarian and depressing appearance, while the technical problems of conservation were just beginning to attract the attention of specialists. About fifty years later, the situation has radically changed. The enormous growth of the bulk of archives throughout the world and their everincreasing use both for administrative and research purposes, have led all countries, provinces, big towns, even private concerns, to build or adapt premises specifically for the conservation and use of archives. (Just to give an example: in France, 64 buildings have been erected or adapted for national and “departe- mental” archives in the 30 years, 1956-1985, compared with only 10 during the preceeding 50 years, 1906-1955.) At the same time, technical progress made it possible to improve the climatic conditions of conservation inside the repositories (central heating, ventilation, air-conditioning), to improve protection against fire hazards (especially with the introduction of automatic fire detection), to devise new methods for repairing damaged documents and to undertake systematic microfilming of precious and fragile records. During those thirty years (1956-1985), virtually every country in the world has had some experience of new buildings for its archives, experimented new techniques, sometimes even initiated new advances in the field of conservation, either of traditional paper documents or of new media such as photographic materials, magnetic tapes or disks, etc. Of course, quite a number of specialized studies have been published in many languages on all these aspects of archive conservation, both in archival journals and in books or periodicals issued by research centers such as the “Istituto di patológia del libro” in Rome or the “Centre de recherche sur la conservation des documents graphiques” in Paris. Five of the ten congresses of the International Council on Archives (Florence 1956, Stockholm 1960, Madrid 1968, Moscow 1972, Washington 1976) were dedicated, fully or partly, to archival buildings and their equipment. The Committee on Conservation and Restoration of the International Council on Archives, created in 1975, has specialized in the problems of conservation and restoration. Many countries, either in the industrialized or the developing world, organized congresses, symposiums or seminars on various aspects of archive conservation. Unesco and the International Council on Archives financed missions of experts in this field. The bibliography of the subject ist important, indeed impressive4). The Seminar held in Vienna from 30 October to 1 November 1985, thanks to Unesco and the Government of the Republic of Austria, was therefore, by no means, a “first approach”. On the contrary, it was intended to be a confrontation of experiences and problems existing to-day in several countries with different climatic and economic conditions. 4) See Archivum 25 (Basic International Bibliography of Archive Administration 1978) Section 13, pp. 128-153. And annual bibliographies in journals such as The American Archivist or Der Archivar. Cf. also Michel Duchein Les bätiments d’archives: construction et équipement (Paris 1985).
