Board meeting at the Department for Archives and Records Management of the Republic of Belarus, 27 October 2011
On 27 October 2011, the Department for Archives and Records Management of the Ministry of Justice of the Republic of Belarus held a board meeting to discuss the progress of work on the scholarly and technical processing of census records, their transferrence to the state archives for preservation and the work of state archives in the provision of information to foreign residents.
On the first issue, the state regional archives and the Belarusian Research Center for Electronic Records carried out a considerable amount of work in scholarly and technical processing of census data filled in during the 2009 census campaign in the Republic of Belarus and their preparation for transfer to the state archives for preservation. The organizational and procedural guidance for the scholarly arrangement of census records was provided by the Department for Archives and Records Management. The arrangement and transfer of records to the state archives for preservation is mainly to be completed in the year 2011. As on 1 October 2011, the state regional archives arranged 55 261 files; 36 819 files have been transferred to the state archives for preservation.
On the second issue, the department board noted that in the period from 2006 through the first half of 2011 the state archives of the Republic of Belarus performed 30 183 inquiries (17,6% of the total number) received from foreign citizens, including 17 353 social legal, 9 973 thematic and 2 857 genealogical inquiries. In the reported period 1 052 foreign users (5,5% of the total number) worked in the reading rooms of the state archives in Belarus. Almost half of them was recorded at the National Historical Archives of Belarus in Minsk (412) and the state archives of Grodno Region (58). An important part of the archives activity in the provision of information to foreign residents was the cooperation in joint use of records in the frames of international exhibition and publication projects and the exchange of records copies with foreign archive institutions based on two-party agreements.