The National Archives of Hungary (Budapest, 2006)

ECCLESIASTICAL ARCHIVES - An Overview of Catholic Ecclesiastical Archives by Andor Lakatos

In the operation of Catholic Archives, application possibilities have played a very important role in the last few years. First, there have been investments, purchases of modern equipment needed for support of archival work from the open/ public private archives since 1996. The support for saving the endangered archives material since 1998 has become the most important source for performing the task of taking care of the material, restoration, purchasing set of shelves, boxes and shelving cabinets. Advertisements of tenders of National Cultural Basic Programme supported to develop finding aids and publications. Supervision of and the development of old fond registers, informative basic finding aids about larger document groups of archives that reflected the conditions of 1950. Despite the fact that the staff is overwhelmed, the work has started. An important task of the future will be to arrange the records found in parishes, and to process and deliver them if needed. However, this can create storage problems, as most of the archives do not have sufficient storage capacity. Professional relationships among archivists become more stronger in recent years. There are more opportunities for meetings at archival associations and at the National Catholic Collection Centre. In the last decade there have been important changes regarding the conditions of staff and operation. Despite these difficulties - knowing that there is a huge amount of work and many tasks before us - we can say that the Catholic Archives have functioned rather superlatively. This assessment is often confirmed by our colleagues at professional conferences who have expressed their : praise and given accolades for the hard work and skillful expertise provided by the staff members of the Archives. We can hear that the Ecclesiastical archives \ - among them the Catholic archives dispensed with the role of the 'disadvantaged relative' and they took their rightful and well deserved places within the professional organization of archival affairs. ECCLESIASTICAL ARCHIVES The seal by Ottokár Prohászka (1905 -1927) archbishop