ARHIVSKI VJESNIK 42. (ZAGREB, 1999.)

Strana - 41

J. Kolanović, Autonomija arhivske službe, Arh. vjesn., god. 42 (1999), str. 29^2 practice and analyze the influence of administrative position of archive service to its autonomy. c) Archivistics an

d historiography. At this conference special attention will be paid to the relation between archives and historiography. In the root of "suppressed and forbidden history" is usually a non-autonomous archive service. Privileged access to documents t

hat only several "state historians" have got is a cause of creation of incorrect historical picture as a product of so called "state historiography." d) Financial autonomy. It is almost impossible to realize all demands of archive service and models of autonomy if certain material base for financing of archival service and repositories are not assured, which are fundamental assumptions for autonomous development of archival service. Human and financial recourses, which are at some archival service disposal, represent necessary assumption for realization of that autonomy. That has been the reason why the majority of European countries ensure financial recourses, necessary for work of their archive services, from the state budget. By this is also meant insurance of storage space for record acquisition. We cannot talk about archives' autonomy if financial means and adequate storage space are not ensured. To that we should add a necessity of university education of an adequate number of professional archivists who will help, with their professionalism, preserving the truth about the past or "integral memory" through entire process, from record creation up to its use. Although the stimulus for elaborating these problems was given by transition countries, problem of autonomy is not less topical, in our opinion, in other European countries. The new technologically development of electronic records poses the problem more actually. Only really autonomous and professional archive service will be able to answer to its always permanent requests: preserve as much as possible of authentic and objective MEMORY OF THE PRESENT TIMES and the truth about ourselves regardless to political and any other systems and ideologies. More concretely: to preserve OBJECTIVE INFORMATION about this time and make it available to the widest circle of people within democratic society. We could say in the conclusion: autonomy of archive service is another name for its professionalism. On an initiative of the Council of Europe, as a subject of this meeting, we have also included problems of destruction and reconstruction of archives as memory of nations. By this is primarily meant destruction caused by war conflicts, the ones that ruled on territories of the former Yugoslavia in the last ten years. From one point of view archives destruction is an attack on the autonomy of archival service. Physical and cultural goods of others are devastated and disintegrated by destruction. It imperils the archival service from outside. In this area, we had a bitter experience of destruction, deliberately and not deliberately. I would like to remind that three inflam41