The National Archives of Hungary (Budapest, 2006)

MUNICIPAL ARCHIVES - County Archives (Regional, general public archives) by Csaba Káli

The biggest file unity of archives today means the documents of the homogeneous public and state organizations, the county district, town and municipal documents. Their collection has not been finished yet due to the act only documents older than fifteen years can get into the archives. Because of the great taking over of documents, a great quantity of documents include 20

th century documents, about two thirds or three quarters. The number of them will increase in the future, that's for sure. The strict task of special archives has been in the last few decades and even today to classify documents. There was hardly any systematic classification of documents before the war in the current archives. But devastation was more serious in documents caused by the war. The archives of the counties of Sopron, Vas and Tolna became mixed up, but there was other great mixtures in other places, too. So after the year of 1945 the arrangement of the documents meant to arrange these documents first and abolish the damage. But still the greatest task in the next years and decades was to classify the quickly, most of the time amateurishly collected material. The aim most of the time was to resettle the original archives. There was positive result with the help of material rearrangement in the case of smaller and smaller, older and older documents but mainly in the case of stocks not having original assistant aid. The other task of archives was sorting out in for close connection with the former task. This became one of the most important tasks with two demands. One of them was to reveal documents important from the point of view of labour movement, the other one was to meet the requirements of plan indexes of collecting paper. The third very important task was to prepare and make the register of files and find aids for scientific reports. Among them the most spread is the store register. Together with the better work up of the material the numbers of repertory, lists and indexes are also increasing fast. The tasks given by clients and researchers also give a lot of work to the archives. Let's see some figures in connection with it. In the year of 2001 the archives accepted 5062 researchers who produced 21.270 cases of research and the number of clients visiting archives was 16.275. In order to work up the material more efficiently the professional archives have to observe documents that are handled over to them. In 2001 the county archives had connections with 10.508 organizations that gave over documents to them. Among them 915 were observed that year. Besides the above explained special work the county archives have to perform essential scientific and educational tasks. Even the decree-law no. 27 of 1969 announced: 'The archives is a scientific institution that - under the frames determined by the rule of law - has to perform administrative tasks.' According to it the county archives became important for Hungarian history