Appraisal, disposal and supervision on them in Galicia until the outbreak of the First World War

Abstract

Regulations about selecting documents for destruction existed in the Austrian Empire as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century. They were usually drafted by local authorities who from time to time ordered removal of old documents from their own registries and the registries belonging to their subordinate offices in order to find space for incoming new documents. In 1832, an imperial decree ordered general removal of unnecessary papers from registries. At the same time, it instructed to preserve any documents of historical value. Ministries of the Empire followed the decree when they issued orders about appraisal and disposal of documents in their subordinate offices. The busiest in this respect was the Ministry of Justice. All the regulations issued by this ministry until 1897 were made without archivists' opinion or assistance, and no supervision was provided over the process of appraisal and disposal carried out by the historical archives which had been emerging since the early 1860s. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Austrian Federal Monuments Office (Central-Commission zur Erforschung und Erhaltung der Baudenkmale) was established in Vienna and it became the nucleus of the Austro-Hungarian heritage protection authority which also took interest in the archives. It employed heritage conservators and correspondents who worked in Galicia since 1888 and collected information about the provincial archives, drew up archive inventory and prevented document destruction. National administration and scientific libraries provided them with support. In 1897, new regulations were issued calling for the courts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to inform the national historical archives about their plans to destroy files. It was also then that the general local authorities in Galicia ordered all the subordinate offices to inform them about such plans by heritage conservators. In fact, only the Archives of Castle and Land Records (archiwa krajowe aktów grodzkich i ziemskich) in Cracow and Lviv were involved in the supervision of documents disposal by the entities that created them, because the vast majority of institutions planning to destroy documents at the time were courts. Because of their financial situation, archives tried to collect information about the files selected for destruction by corresponding with courts, sometimes they asked for the files to be sent over so that the archivists could have a look at them personally, and occasionally their staff travelled to the provinces to carry out an expert appraisal of documentation.