General Documents in Modern Archive Sciences

Abstract

The paper deals with the studies of the problem encountered in the arrangement of recent archives, especially those created after 1945. It is estimated that the greatest problem in this view lies in the so called general documents, namely units of archives or entire fonds in whose creation no systematic filing was applied, whether because at the time of creation such a system did not exist or because the creator of archives did not abide by the rules once the mandatory application of filing system was introduced. These are therefore documents which were filed following an ascending reference number regardless of a noticeable variety of contents of the archives. The results of a questionnaire conducted among archivists for the purpose of this paper and in order to collect experiences, solutions and opinions of the colleagues and approaches used in other Croatian Archives are presented. Based on the analysis of the questionnaire results and personal experience, the author brings his own view of the solution comprising eight factors which need to be considered in the choice of the manner of arrangement of the fonds that contain general records, and whose goal is to facilitate and accelerate the arrangement of such fonds.
The factors are as follows:
1. Macro assessment (assessment of the fonds as a unity, including the actual and assumed interest of the user)
2. Micro assessment (assessment of units within the archives of particular fonds,
including the level of arrangement of the fonds and access to the archives)
3. Registry aids (central record)
4. Constancy of record filing system
5. Archives quantity / quantity of general records within the entirety of archives
6. Available time and human resources
7. Similarity with previously arranged fonds
8. Physical condition of archives
The aim of the paper is to encourage the consideration of the above-mentioned problem and contribute to the discovery of an ideal method to confront this problem, to its resolution and to the consequential accelerated resolving of the problem of enormous backlogs in the process of arranging recent archives.