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 - YU-CHENG, Yao: China's Archive Buildings: Past and Present

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Archive Buildings

This is also true in China’s archive buildings. So, an archive building includes three sorts of rooms:

1) store rooms

2) search room open to the users and

3) workshops and offices.

All these rooms should be sectioned clearly and connected closely in design. Crossed and overlapped passages should be avoided. The inner parts, especially the storerooms should be isolated from the places where visitors can reach. During the investigations, we found many of China’s archive buildings, especially in the southern part of China, large or small, have the common feature that storerooms are surrounded by a closed corridor. Such an arrangement keeps the walls of the storerooms from direct contact with the open air. In so doing, the temperature and humidity is less affected by the outside environment. We have always encouraged this kind of design, because it will bring some benefits to the safekeeping of archival materials whether we adopt air- conditioning or not.

China is a developing country. For economic reasons, we are not in a position to provide air-condition equipment for all the archive buildings to meet the requirements of archives safekeeping. In many of our municipal and county archive buildings we have to rely on structural arrangement to keep inner temperature and humidity in a fair condition.

However, in our provincial archive buildings modem air-conditioners are adopted to maintain the room temperature at 14-24 degrees centigrade and relative humidity at 45-60 per cent.

Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, we have done a great deal of work in archives construction and archives safekeeping, but to be compared with the advanced countries, we still have a long way to go. I believe that we can benefit from the precious experience of developed and also developing countries in these fields. I sincerely hope this meeting will be successful.