Prague will build an archive in Chodovec for 640 million

Prague - Prague plans to add a new wing to the current building of the city archive in Chodovec. It will cost about 640 million crowns. This follows from materials of the city that CTK has access to. The city council should decide in the near future who will win the construction contract. The new building will primarily store archival materials and documents in digital form, but also paper official files.
    The director of the city archive, Václav Ledvinka, told CTK that the main purpose of the new building will be the storage of electronic documents. “We have entered the electronic age,” noted Ledvinka. Due to the digitization of public administration, large quantities of documents created on computers are starting to arrive at the archives, and archivists need to take care of them. A large portion, about 90 percent, is usually destroyed according to Ledvinka, but the rest must be preserved.
    At the same time, the archive wants to build a central repository of so-called live electronic documents. That is, documents that are still used by officials. Currently, they are stored and processed without a unifying system.
    “Since a new building is being constructed, we decided to build several floors of classic depositaries,” said Ledvinka. Official files that were temporarily stored after the floods in 2002 in various locations, such as in the train station building in Bubny or in the Clam-Gallas Palace, will be moved there. According to Ledvinka, archival materials are also being stored in unsuitable places.
    The construction is expected to take about two years. The cost includes information technology only partially. The management of the archive and the city expects that during the construction period, developments in data preservation will progress again, making the current equipment unnecessarily outdated.
    Due to the need to preserve archival materials, Prague will face further investments in the future. The law requires the city to establish a backup data storage facility. It should be located in Malovanka, where a control center for the Blanka tunnel complex will be created.
    According to the new law, the archive must also back up digital archival materials at a distance of fifty kilometers from the central storage facility. Prague will negotiate the location of this facility, according to Ledvinka.
    The city archive of Prague is located in Chodovec; together with the State Regional Archive and the National Archive, it forms one complex.