Dr. Péter Balázs: Guide to the archives of Hungary (Budapest, 1976)

(Introduction)

staff was increasing year by year. In 1950 the Hungarian National Archives employed 55 persons, the repositories of the capital, of the county and city municipalities 82, the archival personnel totalled 137 persons altogether. At the beginning of 1974 the archival personnel reached 400 heads, distributed among the two national and the regional (council) archives as follows: In the Hungarian National Archives 122 persons in the New Central Hungarian Archives 28 persons in the archives of the councils 250 persons total 400 persons In this personnel 157 have university degrees (the so-called scientific staff), 79 lack university degrees (mostly with public schools qualification) handling the material and 164 fulfil administrative, conservative, technical, library and auxiliary tasks. One of the greatest achievements of the socialist archive management is that it extended the archive duty to all administrative, judicial, special organs, institutions, corporations and also to the economic enterprises. Whereas earlier the Hungarian National Archives regarded as its duty to take over the more than 32 years old records of the Ministries and the Supreme Court regularly, and the municipal archives gathered the records of the offices of the upkeeping body (but mainly not at their own initiative), from 1950 the collecting interest of the archives extends to all public records deserving historical preservation. (The party and mass organizations are themselves in charge of the protection and archival conservation of their records.) The volume of the collection of records is shown by the fact that the total of archival material was 74,000 running metres in 1950 and it has grown to 150,000 running metres by the end of 1973. In the whole country the archives are bound to control the registries and record management of cca 150 thousands of organs. Between the two World Wars no large-scale work of arrangement was executed in the municipal archives with one or two exceptions, nay we do not find a major arrangement in the National Archives, not even a plan of such. The National Archives themselves and some local archives suffer red heavy losses in the war. Of the latter the records of Vas, Sopron and Tolna county were entirely mixed up, but similar phenomena occurred at other places too. Arragement had to make up these war damages in the first place.