Ever since the man became aware of the passage of time, he has been trying to keep the past people and events in memory. In ancient times, people preserved and spread the knowledge about the past through myths and, as civilization developed, they started to record the developments and events in order to preserve them for future generations.
Archives are one of the products of the human need not to forget the past. They collect, process, preserve and make available for use to the public documents and similar materials created through the work of different institutions or significant individuals and families from the past. In that sense archives differ from museums in which objects from the past are kept and from libraries, which mostly contain the published scientific and literary heritage from the past eras.
In an intention to present the purpose of the archives and way of their operation in the best possible way we will follow documents from the institution of their creation to the researchers at the archives, who read them years or decades after they were created. |