헝가리의 국립 기록보존소의 역사와 운영관리

The History of Hungarian National Archive

The beginnings of the National Archives of Hungary go back to the Middle Ages. The royal archives developed gradually during the reign of the kings of the Árpád Dynasty from the end of the 12th century. Its documents perished or got scattered in the 16th century when the Ottoman Empire occupied the larger part of Hungary and the country was divided into three parts (the so-called Royal Hungary under Habsburg rule, the Transylvanian principality, and the territory under Ottoman rule). The government offices of the Habsburg royal house in Vienna kept their own records in the same way as the main offices working in Royal Hungary. The Hungarian archives system was re-organised once more at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s. the regional archives were subordinated to the City Council of Budapest and the county councils, special archives were set up, and the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party established its own archives network. The changes affected the National Archives as well. For political reasons, they followed the example of the archives system of the Soviet Union. The foundation of a new archival institution taking care of the documents of the socialist period, which had been planed for one and a half decades, was realised on the 1st of June 1970, when the New Hungarian Central Archives was created from the "Peoples Democratic Department". From then onwards, the formerly unified national institution worked as two separate institutions for more than two decades. Under such conditions, the New Hungarian Central Archives could not fully meet its obligations. It is characteristic that it could only receive 1000 linear metres of documents from the large residues accumulated in the agencies between 1970 and 1978. In the first decade its main task was the arrangement of the records, the preparation of finding aids and the establishment of a retrieval system. Besides, they had to focus on the work with the record creators, taking part in the preparation of the document management regulations, controlling the practice and the disposal 680 institutions that fell within their competence. The Parliament of the Hungarian Republic passed an act on the 12th of December 1991 reunifying the two institutions. The Act 83 of 1991 decreed, at the same time, that the records of the former state party, the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party, were state possessions, which, accordingly, were transferred into the National Archives of Hungary in the first half of 1992. As the act was being drafted, the government decided that a new archives building was to be constructed on the site of the former Soviet military barracks in Óbuda, where the archival material of the liquidated state companies would be kept. The most urgent task, beside the increase of public service, is to receive and store electronic records, that the archives try to accomplish according to international standards.