Jak z artykułu widać, poziom kradzieży jest zatrważający. Ale coś się zaczyna dziać dobrego, jakieś ustalenia, seminaria, instrukcje, programy, nakłady finansowe, publikacje listy strat, jak choćby:
http://www.archives.gov/research/recover/W szczególności warte przeczytania i przemyślenia:
[...] For the first time the above documents contained real suggestions concerning counteractions against illegal records movement, in particular: obligatory registration of documents and their origins by rarities sellers; monitoring of rarities sales catalogues; immunity from taxation for the citizens who obtained stolen documents and brought them back to the archives; strengthening of records movement control within the archives; entitling archives employees to provide researchers with record copies (instead of their originals); promoting research in terms of special methods on marking documents; familiarizing with EU Liber Library Security Network; developing European stolen documents database similar to the stolen works of art database. [...] Thus, archival community is gradually becoming aware of thefts as real and extremely serious threat for archives
We distinguish the major reasons of the threat aggravation as such:
– increase of users non-professionalism (that is, appearance of “mass”, “non-academic” researchers in archives reading rooms);
– providing exceeding services to users, insufficient volume of archives facilities (reading rooms included);
– growing market demand for archival documents, especially for the autographs of outstanding public figures; besides, rapid “black” market development in Eastern Europe;
– lack/insufficiency of strict national legislation which must implement obligatory examination of archival records origin in antiqueshops;
– low level of archivists social protection in Eastern Europe which results in personnel crises and provokes to “internal” thefts;
– unsatisfactory archives protection level due to outdated protection means in some Eastern European countries;
– imperfect internal archives guidelines regulating access to documents as well as their movement within archives;
– inadequate security copy volume in archives; in its turn, it leads to providing researchers with originals both in reading rooms and archivists’ offices.
[...] Archival thefts are basically different from museums and libraries thefts:
in most cases, archives thefts and sales of stolen documents are mainly performed by a
corrupted archivist, in other words,
this is mostly internal criminal. An external criminal can be effectively counteracted by technical protection means as well as by limited original documents movement within the archive owing to digital and other copies; in case of
an internal criminal ANY protection is helpless.
Page-by-page marking of
all documents aimed at preventing originals movement outside archives is physically impossible worldwide because of enormous archives' records volumes. Unlike museum or library thefts, the archives ones are much less visible: actually, the fact of a document disappeared can be established while inventory or inquiry made for a lacking document, so it might take ages to establish the fact of the theft in archives.
To summarize it all, we can state that total avoiding of internal archives thefts is unreal today, thus, we have to concentrate well coordinated international efforts so that to define stolen documents on markets and block illegal movement of archival records.