Arhivski vjesnik, Vol. 63 No. 1, 2020.
Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.36506/av.63.3
The Relevancy of Vjesnik’s Newspaper Documentation as the Cultural Good of the Republic of Croatia and as Archival Source
Dijana Cenger
; State Archive in Virovitica
Abstract
The paper analyses the users’ function of the newspaper collection created within “Vjesnik” publisher from 1964 to 2006. Based on the available references and sources, the introduction describes the creation, purpose and function of Vjesnik’s newspaper documentation within “Vjesnik”, its parent publisher. The introductory deliberation is also complemented with the outline of the past insights regarding the strategic planning of the processing, the protection procedures that had been carried out, as well as usage of Vjesnik’s documental collection from its creation to the transfer to the Croatian State Archives. The paper then presents the results of the analysis of the accessibility and usage of Vjesnik’s newspaper documentation from 1 June 2013 i.e. its transfer to the Croatian State Archives and defined as a cultural good to 31 December 2019. To that extent, the analysis ascertains the considerable percentage of usage of Vjesnik’s newspaper documentation when compared to other conventional archival records stored at the Croatian State Archives during the specified period (the average of 9,61 %). The relevancy of Vjesnik’s newspaper documentation as an archival source for scientific and professional research was additionally researched by analysing the content of its thematic wholes and examining the congruities of the content within technical units with the structured list, on the sample of minimal 1 % of technical units. Based on this analysis the following had been established: 1. The information from the collection’s structural list (numbers of technical units, titles of thematic wholes and subunits) completely matches the actual condition of the collection. 2. The main drawback in individual thematic wholes concerns the repeated overlapping of keywords in various subunits and the omission of the content’s description regarding individual technical units, which makes it difficult to identify and find newspaper articles within them. 3. The newspaper articles were almost in their entirety put in the corresponding wholes i.e. only within the thematic whole entitled “Judiciary and crime” it was noticed that, considering their subject matter, the minority of newspaper articles should have been put in the “Society/Healthcare/Welfare” thematic whole. 4. The high congruity percentage regarding the description of technical units’ contents with newspaper articles’ subject matter within them (arithmetic mean i.e. x=95,44 %) enables the efficient search of identified and contextually described newspaper articles within archival boxes. Based on acquired research results of user function of Vjesnik’s newspaper documentation, the attempts so far to convert it to digital form and research of the newspapers and magazines available online from the territory of the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia in the period from 1964 to 1990 and the territory of the Socialist Republic of Croatia from 1990 to 2006, the paper conclusively examines the necessity of its full digitisation and suggests guidelines for further procedures regarding the increase of its availability and protection.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
248558
URI
Publication date:
17.12.2020.
Visits: 1.432 *