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

(Introduction)

Though the material preserved in the archives before 1945 has not been sufficiently arranged either, the greatest task was presented by the arrangement of the recently collected material. The general aim set to the work of arrangement was the following: after dividing the material to archival groups, sub-groups and series (arrangement on a basic level) inside the smallest stack-room units the largest archival units, corresponding the best to the system of archival groups, should be formed, ie. the records should be arranged at a level deeper than archival groups and sub-groups but not as deep as the single pieces, thus at medium level between the two. By the end of 1973 this level of arrangement was reached in 85 per cent, of the material. The national ratio of the completely unarranged records, therefore inapt to research, does not surpass 5 per cent. About 25 per cent, of the records preserved in the archives await still selection. The production of finding aids is an important part of archival work. The entire material of Hungarian archives is comprised in synthetic finding aids, so-called basic inventories, serving equally the safe custody and the orientation of researchers. (Of these the inventories of the National Archives and of the Budapest Municipal Archives have been published, the remaining ones are at disposal for research in the respective archives or with the Archives' Board, respectively.) In the National Archives so-called descriptive inventories have been prepared to the records of the central organs of feudal government and jurisdiction, embracing also the history of offices, analytically describing the contents of the material, giving a more thorough information for research; their continuous publication is secured by the Academy Publishing House. In the Hungarian National Archives the records of the central governmental organs of the capitalistic period, the major family archives, the economic organs, the film archives and the material of some Roman Catholic ecclesiastical archives (Esztergom, Eger, Székesfehérvár) have been described in lists, going down to the stack-room units (bundles, volumes) in mechanical systems of registration and to the smallest subject items in systems led by the subject. In this series called Archival Inventories more than 60 volumes have been published so far. By composing and publishing the so-called lists of archival groups we made an important step forward to make the information on the records preserved in the archives and the data contained in them quicker and surer. Published according to nationally identical principles and in a uniform structure, these lists describe the entire material of each archives on the level of archival