Digitisation as part of traditional conservation: Options of digitisation, microfilming and mass conservation in workflow

Public authorities throughout the world are generating more and more electronic documents as originals. Such electronic records have to be stored, evaluated, indexed and conserved. It is one of the largest tasks with which archives have ever been confronted. It is a global task. However, it is not only originals of electronic documents which present archivists all over the world with a problem. The call for complete accessibility of more and more archival material, which is being voiced increasingly on account of the options available with digitisation and the Internet, also involves many different problems which archives cannot solve so easily. In Germany there are institutions which could perform the digitisation of records, microfilming and mass conservation of originals in a single workflow. They are two socalled archive centres in Berlin and Cologne which are run as publicprivate partnerships by the government – e.g. in Berlin by the Federal Archives of Germany – and a private company.