Increasing the level of awareness of the public administration staff in the protection of archival documentation

Abstract

Public administration institutions as well as other public-private and private institutions during their activity create a large amount of archival documents. Those documents are an important source of information for the functioning of those institutions, but later also an important source for research, scientific and historical activity.The documents created during the work activity of public institutions are the basis of the information needed by the staff to fulfill their work tasks, starting from the daily, weekly, monthly and annual as well as in many work processes during the decision making. Based on this, creators and possessors of archival documents should pay special attention to the preservation and protection of archival documents that have been created in their professional activity. National legal provisions and international standards for the management of archival documents regulate the procedures for managing archival documents in the classical form, on paper and in electronic form from the moment of creation, storage, and use to submission at the competent archive. For creators, documents are stored within the legal deadline. The staff that creates documents keeps them in the manual archive (employment office) for two years and then they are submitted to the archive repository of the institution with minutes, in addition to those documents that were needed for operational work. Those documents after 30 years, selected and recorded in the minutes are submitted to the competent archive. To perform these works, a professionally trained staff is required, which unfortunately in Kosovo, we still do not have at the right level. Therefore, the Kosovo Institute for Public Administration (KIPA), as a competent institution at the level of the Republic of Kosovo for the training of public administration staff in cooperation with the Kosovo State Archives Agency (KSAA) should organize professional training for the staff of public administration institutions that create archival documents and in raising awareness of the importance of that documentation of legal, scientific and historical value and that has the quality of a cultural monument.