Arhivski vjesnik, Vol. 61 No. 1, 2018.
Pregledni rad
The Acquisition Policy – Does It Exist in the Croatian Archival Service?
Silvija Babić
; Hrvatski Državni Arhiv, Zagreb, Hrvatska
Sažetak
The paper gives an overview of the acquisition practice and policy in Croatia; it notices the discrepancy between the publicly declared and theoretical attitudes with individual actions in practice and it indicates the same set of problems in other countries and archival practices. The issue of an acquisition i.e. acquiring archival materials in public archives minimally pertains to two fields: the issue of the acquiring policy related to the archives of individual creators (simply put, acquiring archival fonds) and also the issue of appraising the archives i.e. acquiring individual types of records of a certain creator. The practice of the Croatian archival service, as well as the theoretical writings in the last fifty years are pointing to the fact of a periodical shift of focus to one or the other aspects of the acquisition criterion. The outline of the acquisition policy of the Croatian public (state) archives explained in the paper is based on the analysis of their yearly reports that among other activities also point out the information about acquiring the archives. It is interesting to note that only one of the state archives states to have the adopted document regarding the acquisition plan, but from the collective information it is possible to draw certain conclusions on the approach of the archival institutions to
the acquisition activities. Some of the characteristics are: the public archives are acquired most often and in the comparatively largest quantities; very often the archives are transferred without the expiry of the acquisition deadline established by the law (30 years since their creation); all prescribed conditions are often not met during the acquiring (the level of arrangement, cataloguing, technical equipping
and even administrative completeness); only few archives emphasize the mentioned activity as a separate whole in the report; the information mostly presented is that on the number of the executed acquiring procedures and the quantity of the acquired archives in total. All this points to the fact that the archives are mostly acquired at the initiative of the person who is giving them, as well as the fact that the prevailing information pertains to quantity, instead of pointing to the merit of the thing: the number and type of fonds and the type of archives and their state. This could be the consequence of a typically budget-related financing, as well as reporting. The article generally problematizes the issue of existence of a systematic and long-term acquisition policy, and also – so it appears – the quite valid controversiality and relativity of such an issue and attitude, which is also indicated by the practice of other countries/traditions, as well as theoretical deliberations of foreign archivists. It can be concluded that the majority of archivists in their institutions still hesitate to produce a clearly defined policy of acquiring the archives that will be verified as an official document. The “blame” for this state can be put on the general attitude that acquiring archives to an archival institution is to some extent accidental i.e. the archivists acquiring the records in the institutions are never completely certain if and when the acquiring will indeed take place. All this points to the conclusion that the long-term, completely rounded off and firm (rigid) concept of the policy pertaining to acquiring the archives, bearing in mind the swiftness of changes of social interests, systems of value and also informational-communicational concepts of the global society, may indeed be redundant, even though for a long time the archival community has been professing a “firm” attitude about the need and the necessity to create and establish the consistent acquisition policy.
Ključne riječi
acquisition policy of public archives; practice of acquiring the archives in Croatia; appraising the fonds; appraising the records; long-term acquisition policy
Hrčak ID:
216935
URI
Datum izdavanja:
14.9.2018.
Posjeta: 1.491 *