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 - STEWART, William J.: Summary of Discussions
268 William J. Stewart guidelines, technical standards, reports, and special studies. Until now, this data was never collected and organized as you did in your paper. Now that I have told you it is an outstanding paper you will permit me one critical remark. I think in a modem building security needs and other requirements have to be balanced. After reading your paper I concluded that in some respects you overstated the security factor. For example, I feel your recommendation of no windows on the ground floor might hinder the architect as well as affect the functional quality of the building. You also asked for a separation between the stack rooms and the search room. You even recommended they be located on different floors with stairs in between. From a functional perspective I do not think this is really justified. In fact, in planning our new archive, I fought to ensure that on as many levels as possible we had the same floor level in the stacks as in the areas adjacent, precisely to avoid stairs. Because of the different height requirements in the administrative areas and laboratories and in the stacks I was successful only in three of five floors. Let me say in conclusion that I favor more balance between security, function, and architectural quality. I ask whether you would agree or not? Thomas: I am going to try and defend my position. First of all, I am convinced as I stated in my paper, archivists haven’t paid enough attention to security. Today, many countries are seeing an increase in terrorism and criminal activity. Most national archives contain material which one group or another would regard as politically sensitive and possibly worthy of attack. In the Public Record Office there is material relating to Palestine which one party or the other might regard as politically aggravating. Also, I believe there is good evidence on this score from the United States, in fact Mr Stewart drew my attention to this. There has been a lot of criminal activity relating to book libraries. Stewart: I appreciate what Dr Buchmann said earlier about reducing the chance for fire in terms of the equipment that you put into the building and you can do these things and should do them but you always face the unpredictable situation of arson. The major destructive fire of recent times in the United States government presumably was caused by internal arson. No one was brought to the bar of justice but that is irrelevant. I do know that you cannot protect these buildings to the extent you wish and provide the architect with a great deal of design flexibility. What you can do is create strong zones within the structure itself, yet from an exterior perspective the building does not look all that different, still, it is nearly impossible to breach these vault-like areas. This costs money, of course, and what you are creating is partial internal construction similar to a bank. Ms Kamba: One of the ironic situations is that archivists have gone out of their way to encourage the popular use of archives. By doing so, we have attracted into our institutions the wrong element. When archives were used
