At the European Summit on Archives in 1996, dele-gates agreed that the three principal issues for European archivists are the management of elec-tronic records, training for personnel (with a major issue again the handling of new record formats) and preservation of the European archival heritage.
The management of current and semi-current records is an issue that generally unites the countries of Europe and North America, particularly in the face of growing challenges posed by electronic records. The 1993 survey found that 89% of European national archives have an active role in the management of current or semi-current records in ministries, making the pressure to provide electronic records guidance particularly intense. Conversely, most European archives do not operate facilities for storing temporary records, an important issue in managing large paper records series (the United States is a very major exception). Consequently, the critical issue for most European archives is providing guidance to the records creators, in particular in the area of electronic records, not in finding ever larger storage facilities for semi-current records.
The electronic records issue binds Europe together. Although the development of the comput-erized office generally occurred earlier in Western Europe, the computerization of Central and Eastern Europe has occurred at lightning speed, as external donors put computers in parliaments and courts and as businesses snapped them up for commercial ventures. This means that the intensity of the com-puter question, particularly for the very latest systems, is at least as pervasive in Eastern Europe as in the West.
Essential to the management of modern records is trained and constantly retrained staff. In 1993, the average number of professional staff in all European national archives was 505, but if the huge Russian national archival system is excluded, the average drops to 137. Between 1982 and 1992, reported the national archives, their professional staffing increased by 24%; again, if Russia is excluded, the staffs actually doubled. Hidden within these figures, however, is the ambiguity of who the national archives reported as professional staff. Further, there is the question of balance between professional and paraprofessional staffs. As Roper noted:
In the national archives of Central and Eastern Europe (both with and without the figures for Russia) the total number of other members of staff is lower than the total number of professional staff, whereas in national archives both in the rest of Europe and in developing countries it is higher. This suggests that in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe professional staff are undertaking work which elsewhere is performed by non-professional staff.
The means by which archival education is provided is a common concern among European archives but there is far from a common practice. There is archival education in state archives schools at the graduate level (Germany) and at the undergraduate level (the Netherlands) which leads directly to the qualification for employment in the state archival service; there are graduate (for example in Canada) and undergraduate degree programmes that are in general universities and are not tied to the govern-ment’s employment system. Some programmes offer full degrees in archives; others are concentrations within another discipline (history or library science);
an emerging trend is to have a general programme in information studies that combines some elements of information science, librarianship, archival studies and history (the Netherlands and Switzerland). The 1993 study found that 49% of European countries have one or more archival training schools; the actual number was sixty-five schools with an average an-nual graduation of 995 archivists. A look at course syllabi also reveals enormous differences, with some schools offering traditional courses in sigillography and diplomatics and others emphasizing analysis of business processes and information systems.
In-service training programmes are also com-mon in European national archives. Some of these offer professional training roughly at a university level, while others are courses for paraprofessionals.
In some instances these are open to the records staff in government agencies, to records managers employed by private organizations, or professional
archivists outside the government. Some courses end with an examination and a certificate that can be used to demonstrate proficiency to future employ-ers. The 1993 census found considerable numerical disparities between Central and Eastern Europe and the rest of Europe: Central and Eastern Europe reported 200 training programmes, with an average of thirty-three participants per programme, while the rest of Europe reported 1,134 in-service pro-grammes with an average of sixty per programme.
Six Eastern and Central European countries also reported training abroad; twenty-two European stu-dents attended short courses outside their home countries (three-quarters of these went to the Stage Technique International at the National Archives of France).
Archival education increasingly is challenged to provide the new skills needed to manage archives in the current information age. Two shifts are occurring simultaneously: first, records are created and main-tained electronically in the entities that are the sources of archival holdings, requiring archives to move aggressively to protect the archival informa-tion in the complex environment of modern manage-ment systems; second, archives are themselves intro-ducing and adapting automation to facilitate work in the archives. Recent graduates from academic archival programmes emphasizing digital, process-related information are entering European archival institutions and challenging with their enthusiasm the staff already employed there. Effective in-service training programmes are urgently needed through-out the European archival world in order to ensure that serious divisions of competency do not occur within the professional community.
The third major concern identified at the archival summit in spring 1996 was preservation.
There are many aspects to this problem: buildings, storage equipment and housing, laboratory treat-ment and reformatting for use. Again, the 1993 sur-vey provides some data on the status of preservation
programmes in European national archives (see Chapter 25).
Facilities are a central concern of archivists everywhere. The nature of archives is that the hold-ings are continuously expanding, and space utiliza-tion is a constant preoccupautiliza-tion. In 1993, 22% of European archives reported occupying central national archival repositories within the last ten years, but several major construction projects are under way or have been completed since then, including facilities in the Czech Republic, Hungary and the United States. Only 47% of the national archives in Europe reported purpose-built reposito-ries; it seems reasonable to assume that regional and non-governmental archives occupy an even smaller number of purpose-built spaces. European archives also reported 66% of central repositories with tem-perature and humidity controls, and 49% with microform storage accommodation to international standards. By contrast, state archives in the United States reported 92% with purpose-built repositories and 92% with climate controls. All this suggests that European archives have major problems of adaptive re-use of older buildings, and consequently must struggle to maintain adequate preservation condi-tions for the materials stored within them.
A related issue is how full the repositories are.
In Europe, 86% of repositories are more than three-quarters full, and 18% are completely filled. This is even more significant because the reported capacity for national archives in Europe increased by 58% in the period 1982–92. The average European national archives had 93,000 square metres of holdings in 1993. The statistics on transfers into archives are difficult to analyse, but the average national archival system took in nearly 6,000 linear metres in 1992.
This figure probably includes some transfers into regional and other archives in centralized archival systems, not just into the national repository in the nation’s capital. None the less, the national archives are disturbingly full. And if national governments
find it difficult to provide adequate space for ever-expanding archival holdings, it seems unlikely that the non-governmental archives are faring any better.
Tighter appraisal standards, a matter of active debate in (for example) the United States, will alleviate but not solve the space needs of archives. Without ade-quate repositories, a country’s documentary heritage is jeopardized.
The technical facilities within repositories are a measure of the importance of preservation pro-grammes to national archives. Here again, the 1993 data are difficult to interpret. Conservation work-shops are reported in 50% of European national archives, and they average over two workshops apiece. Between 1982 and 1992 the conservation staff nearly doubled in these repositories, with the aver-age rising to eighteen persons. If we turn to reprog-raphy, however, the picture changes. Only 13% of European national archives report reprographic lab-oratories, and the number of staff employed in them decreased by 7% overall (however, the reprographic staff increased by 10% in Central and Eastern Europe, offsetting a surprising 19% decrease in the rest of Europe). It is unclear whether the decline in reprographic staff in West European archives reflects a trend towards contracting out for reprographic services, using a different reformatting technique, or not currently duplicating holdings, awaiting further developments in electronic scanning or hoping that mass de-acidification will be cost-effective, making reprography unnecessary. In any event, the apparent lack of reformatting capacities in most European archives suggests that original records are made available to users, even those records that are extremely popular, setting up a future need for expensive conservation treatments.
Preserving electronic records requires both physical facilities and the management of the physi-cal and logiphysi-cal structures of the item. The techniphysi-cal facilities available in archives to handle electronic records are not as yet widespread. The techniques
for preserving electronic records have evolved with the changes in the information industry; for exam-ple, the preservation of flat files is well understood, the preservation of relational databases is fast becoming a standard practice and the preservation of electronic mail is rapidly emerging as a basic tech-nique. The fast advances in imaging technology are currently causing very serious problems for European archives, both because their popularity means that more and more images are created, and because the hardware and software dependency of imaging systems is extremely high and the rate of innovation extremely fast, leaving orphaned systems (and images) littering the way. Add to this the devel-opments in the television industry, linking sound, image and text, and the problems mount. At present the only means of preservation is duplication to a current system, assuming that the system on which the image was generated is still operating (or can be made to operate). And yet it is essential that archives grapple with these issues, for in the long term this is the way records will be created, maintained, and used (see Chapters 14 and 25).