Basic archival terms
An archive is an institution that is used for the depositing and care of archival records and that has accreditation issued by the Ministry of the Interior or is established by Act No. 499/2004 Coll., on archives and records management and on amendments to certain laws.
Archival records are documents which, due to the time of their creation, content, origin, external features and permanent value given by their political, economic, legal, historical, cultural, scientific or informational significance, have been selected in the public interest for permanent preservation and have been included in the register of archival records, i.e. have become part of the National Archival Heritage.
Archival fonds (selection of documents coming from a single originator) and archival collections (artificial aggregate of documents created based on common criteria, regardless of the originators of the documents) are the basic units of record in the Czech archival system. Archival fonds include, for example, the resources of individual authorities, public administration bodies, courts, companies, associations and prominent personalities. Examples of archival collections include collections of registries, collections of maps and plans, postcards, etc.
Finding aids are tools that are created during the processing of archival records and serve for better orientation in the archival records and their temporal scope, facilitate the understanding of the archival records, and help familiarise the researcher with the administrative and professional context of the records.
A cultural and scientific institution is an institution that owns or keeps archival records on the basis of its collection-making activities, but is not an archive. These include museums, libraries, memorials, galleries, institutes of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, some universities, etc.
Creators are natural or legal persons or groups of persons acting under the same name (corporation, family) who have created or received documents in the course of their activities. These documents, if selected as archival records, are compiled into archival fonds. The relationship of the originator to the archival record is called provenance. The originators of archival fonds include, for example, individual authorities, public administration bodies, courts, companies, associations and prominent personalities. The originator is also indicated for archival collections – in such a case the originator is the creator of the collection.
