Public Record Office
The Public Record Office (PRO) was the UK's national archive from 1838 to 2003 . It emerged in 1838 from a number of isolated archives held by British institutions. In 2003 it merged with the Historical Manuscripts Commission and the Office of Public Sector Information to form The National Archives .
The headquarters of the Public Record Office was in Rolls House on Chancery Lane in the heart of London until the 1970s , and has been located on the outskirts of Kew since 1974 .
The government established the office in 1838 through the Public Records Act. Up to this year the state records had been collected in 56 different archives of various authorities. Some of these had already been prepared and archived according to the standards of the time. However, the papers often lay unseen and thrown on top of each other without a system in damp rooms. The conditions of storage differed considerably, sometimes even in the same authority. One of the two guardians of the documents in the Tower of London received a regular salary, the other earned his income exclusively from the fees he could collect for searching and copying documents.
The Public Record Office, headed by the Master of the Rolls , was supposed to unite these archives and systematize the indexing of the materials. To accomplish this, the British state had a new building built in central London. The archive materials came in the following years from various offices, with extensive material in particular in the Tower of London that had been collected there since the 14th century. However, the construction of the archive building was carried out amid extensive debates on costs and saw a general unwillingness of Parliament to invest money in archiving. Although the Public Record Act was from 1838, it took 13 years to build a building before it began in 1851.
The creation of the Public Record Office thus coincided with a time when history was beginning to establish itself as an independent subject. The specialists of the Public Record Office were thus among the first professional historians.
While the office limited itself to collecting laws in its early years, it quickly expanded its collection area to include internal documents from ministries and authorities. The archive was also available to the public from around 1866, as reading rooms were completed. At the end of the 19th century, the legislature passed various laws that systematized the work of the archive. For the first time, authorities and ministries were required to submit their documents. There are guidelines for the office as to when which files are to be made public and how to deal with files that are not intended for long-term preservation.
In 1959 the internal procedure changed. Through the Public Records Act of 1958, Parliament placed the archive directly under Lord Chancellor's . Since then, day-to-day business has been headed by the Keeper of the Rolls . For the first time, the public was given the fundamental right to inspect documents that had been kept in the archive for at least 50 years. In 1967 this period was reduced to 30 years by a further law.
Colloquially and in the press, the authority was often referred to in the plural as the Public Records Office . However, this changes the meaning of the word in English and was never part of the name.
literature
- John Cantwell: The public record office: The legal and departmental records. In: The Journal of Legal History. 2: 3, pp. 227-237.
- Philippa Levine: History in the Archives: The Public Record Office and Its Staff, 1838–1886. In: The English Historical Review. Vol. 101, No. 398 (Jan. 1986), pp. 20-41.
Web links
- National Archives: History of the Public Records Acts
Remarks
- ↑ Levine p. 20.
- ↑ Levine p. 21.
- ^ Philippa JA Levine: The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England 1838-1886. Cambridge University Press, 2003, ISBN 0521530504 , p. 2.