Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Staatsarchivs 39. (1986)

Archive Buildings and the Conservation of Archival Material. An Expert Meeting, held in Vienna, Austria October 30 - November 1, 1985 - BUCHMANN, Wolf: Planning an Archive Building. The Cooperation between Architect and Archivist

Planning an Archive Building

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special attention was paid to the non-angular form of the shelf posts, which must enable not only unrestricted utilization of the complete depth of the shelf, but also easy access to archival materials located at the ends of the shelves;

it goes almost without saying that every kind of inflammable material, such as wood or plastic, must be avoided in order to keep the danger of fire to a minimum;

in order to determine the quality of the drive and ease of mobility of the whole equipment, a test was conducted to see whether a shelf bay, when loaded to the critical weight (5 tons according to the current specifications in the Federal Republic of Germany), could still be moved without difficulty by operating the drive of the next bay to which no weight was applied. Aside from these primary considerations a number of other details were tested, e. g. mounting the shelves, and ease of handling when readjusting a shelf unit.

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For the archivists the discussion and the planning of the new building for the Bundesarchiv had a rather unexpected result: In these discussions all the working procedures, the need of every device, the necessity of every square metre in the repositories, in fact sometimes even the archives as such were questioned and had to be explained or even defended. Therefore the planning of a new building forces an archivist to deal with all the fundamental questions of his profession again. Thereby a new building offers a chance to reorganize some established procedures and to update them according to the needs of today and in some respects of the future. Furthermore these discussions and explanations to others were in fact not really a one-way process. It is a chance also for the archivist to learn from the others and to become more conscious again of his task and of his responsibility for the maintenance of the cultural heritage of his nation.