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 - THOMAS, David: Architectural Design and Technical Equipment for the Physical Protection and Conservation of Documents
250 Archive Buildings 7.1 Archives in the modern world need to have a higher profile and this can be achieved by holding exhibitions; provision for these should be made in any new building. The exhibition space should be provided with the same climate and the same protection against theft, vandalism and fire as in the repository. Escape routes should be available in accordance with national legislation. The main conservation requirement for exhibition areas is the need to reduce light levels; the maximum level for documents written or printed in carbon ink is 150 lux, for all other records it'is 50 lux. No sunlight should fall directly or be reflected on to a case containing records80). In practice it is difficult to achieve these levels in rooms lit by natural light and the simplest way to control light levels is to provide a room without windows or with ones which can be shielded by curtains. Ceiling mounted tracks should be provided for lighting and wall mounted sockets for electricity. Illumination can either be provided by tungsten-filament lamps or by fluorescent lamps fitted with ultra violet filters. The modem style of exhibitions requires that the space be as flexible as possible and if elaborate displays are to be considered in the future then inflexible features such as built-in show cases should be avoided. 7.2 Archive buildings designed in the 1980s will need to be able to accommodate the major changes in information technology which will occur in the next twenty or thirty years. Unfortunately, I do not know what these changes will be. What I can do, however, is to summarize the way in which recent developments have affected libraries in the hope that there may be some lessons to be learnt from this. Many recent libraries were built with large computer rooms and card catalogue halls, only to discover that these were made obsolete by the development of micro-computers and on-line or microfiche catalogues. Libraries in the future will require space for newer media: video, microfilm and machine-readable records. Users will need more space with power supplies and possibly communication outlets for terminals or micro-computers. The buildings will require a greater floor loading to cope with the different types of record and will need more power outlets and conduits to carry co-axial or fibre optic cables81). It is these changes in technology which are likely to have a major impact on archive buildings in the future. One possible development is that an increasing proportion of records will not be read on paper but on some other medium. Some will be computer generated, while others will be copies of existing documents on film, disc or some other, as yet unannounced storage medium. If this does happen, and it would really only be a development of an existing 80) BS section 13.2.2. 81) M. Beckman Library Buildings in the Network Environment in Journal of Academic Librarianship 9 (1983) 281-284.
