How Accessible are European Public Archives? An Assessment of the Compliance with the Council of Europe Recommendation R(2000)13 on a European Policy on Access to Archives

This paper takes as its starting point the lessons learned from the second pan-European study on access to archives conducted 20 years after the first one – with the understanding that these results may also provide global lessons. The principal aim of the study was to assess the European archives' compliance with the Council of Europe Recommendation No. R(2000)13 on a European policy on access to archives, which was adopted in July 2000 and was the first international norm in this field. Although the overall access situation in Europe has significantly improved over the past 20 years, several practices still exist that are incompatible with the requirements of the Recommendation. These include the need for special authorization to access otherwise unrestricted documents or finding aids, as well as denying access based on the research topic or the insufficient qualifications of the user. In some countries, certain documents may remain classified and thus restricted in their accessibility without time limit. In addition to the challenges of digitization, and handling born-digital documents, the changing expectations and demands of archive users also pose challenges that archives of today must face. This article attempts to place these empirical results in a broader context.