National and Municipal Archives of the Federal Republic of Germany

Mass records: attitude to archiving mass records (scale); refusal by authorities and offices to provide mass records for reasons of data protection; acceptance of mass records within the last 10 years; judgement on one´s own possibilities of continuous acceptance of mass records; presence of systematic plans for preservation or annulment of mass record holdings; interest in recommendations of social scientists for the use of statistical procedures to obtain representative samples from registries of different structure; presence of statistical censuses or surveys since 1945 in personal holdings. 4.

Machine-readable data: access to data processing equipment; number of employees with experience in electronic data processing; knowledge about type and amount of machine-readable data accumulating in government offices at the time; judgement on personnel and actual equipment of archive in view of archiving machine-readable data; acceptance of data, complete or on a random basis; characterization of holdings; interest in further archiving; reasons for not yet accepting or reasons for intent to accept machine-readable data in the next few years; effects of use of machine-readable data on archiving process; attitude to preparation and integration of data sets as archive task; assumed future user group with interest in machine-readable data holdings. 5.

Tasks and way of working of archive: assessment of archive as information and documentation facility; judgement on selected measures to increase reputation of archive in public (scale); type of acceptance practice of written material by archive; influence of archive on addition of background information to archive holdings; possibilities to estimate future development of holdings; archiving for a limited time documents whose historical value could not be estimated at the time of acceptance; instruments used to record files or develop files; presence of usage statistics; determined changes in composition of users; possibility to classify holdings according to different user groups; perceived change in task of archives in the last few years; expectations of the technical information center for the humanities; securing written material as primary task. 6.

Usage regulation: type of usage regulation; presence of usage time limits and conditions for use; type of written material with use time limits; time of sole decision about the usability; modalities of use of holdings; usage regulations and data protection; access modalities for research; perceived change of archive task. 7. Archive laws: probability of a new archive law coming to be; judgement on legal basis of archive up to now and for future requirements of data protection; attitude to the function of archive laws, both to satisfy the need to protect the citizen as well as to meet the information needs of historical research; most important archive tasks needing to be regulated by an archive law; judgement on a usage restriction for authorities after archiving; judgement on practicality of a general right to access and information for persons affected; assumed number of such queries; desire for stronger effort on the part of scientific users for the interests of the archive system; presence of sources containing information on marriages in the time period from 1800 to 1945; superior department; number and course of training of employees.