Sonderband 2. International Council on Archives. Dritte Europäische Archivkonferenz, Wien 11. bis 15. Mai 1993. Tagungsprotokolle (1996)
2. Session /Séance. Regional (trans-border) Cooperation / Coopération régionale (transfrontaliere) - Brejon de Lavergnée, Marie-Edith: New economic Zones and their Archives / Nouvelles zones économiques et leurs archives (english 77 - français 100)
2. Session/Séance: Brejon de Lavergnée, New economic Zones and their Archives In practice, archives are not always kept in the same place for long but moved about whenever those responsible for a particular aspect of the business change their location. Thus, practically all the euroregions have settled on rotating chairmanships and secretariats, a system which can, moreover become complicated when the same region undertakes to provide both the chairmen and the secretariat of two different co-operative bodies. The secretariat of the large French region called the Greater South is at present provided by Aquitaine before it passes to the Mid-Pyrenees region and then to Languedoc-Roussillon. Similarly Languedoc-Roussillon occupies the secretariat of the euroregion of Catalonia, Midi-Pyrénées and Languedoc-Roussillon at Montpelliers for two years. For its part Spanish Catalonia is involved in another body with Baden-Württemberg, Lombardy and the Rhône-Alpes region. The dangers of this practice for rotating secretariats are predictable. To entrust the archives every two years to a new secretariat will cause delays in transfers and the creation of similar working files and will encounter transport and dispatching problems: indeed the hand-over of archives to a new chairman will take place once, perhaps twice but never ever thrice. To contemplate storing archives in one fixed location, whilst at the same time retaining the practice of rotating secretariats is the option chosen by the Catalonia, Midi Pyrénées, Languedoc-Rousillon euroregion. The town chosen for this purpose is Perpignan situated at the centre of the three regions. It is proposed that all the records should be brought together there but political interests have not yet allowed the completion of a building made available by the municipal authority, staffed by municipal employees. Moreover, political difficulties apart, this solution also raises several other questions. As long as chairmanship are rotating, it is easy to see that the chairman must have working documents available to him without having to retrieve them from somewhere several hundred kilometres away. Out of this two possibilities arise, either nothing is left in Perpignan and the first case examined already is repeated with the records also rotating with the same risks already discussed or else similar files are created which, theoretically find their way into the private residence of the chairman in office, in the same way that in France an elected councillor, who is also a regional councillor and a mayor keeps his working documents, for most of the time in his town hall, which is what happens most often. Leaving semi-current records in the headquarters of the euroregion can be considered as a possibility, whilst at the same time current records circulate. This system, leaving aside the problems previously mentioned, would require charts of administrative use to be kept up-to date and introducing them would be a matter of some delicacy, the more so as the records of the euroregion run the risk of being mixed up with regional records since they are consulted by its own staff in dealing with European matters for which they are responsible. The involvement of archival professionals seems indispensable and the question arises of the consequences for archivists and archival institutions resulting from 90
