Legal foundations

The legal foundations for the Hanover university archive consist of a series of interrelated laws and legal provisions which to some extent either supplement each other in terms of content or are based on each other. It is from this “bundle” of legal provisions that the university archive derives its obligations, but also its rights in respect to the handling of its tasks.

The Constitution of Lower Saxony guarantees universities/colleges in Art. 5 (3) the right to self administration in the framework of the law. In supplement, the Niedersächsische Hochschulgesetz (NHG) (i.e. Lower Saxony university/college act) also includes the principle of the right to self administration of universities/colleges (§ 15 NHG), and of the administration of certain public tasks by the universities/colleges (§ 47 NHG). Correspondingly, the Niedersächsische Archivgesetz (NArchG) (i.e. Archive act of Lower Saxony) prescribes in § 7 Par. 3, Sentence 3, that university archives, in their area of competency, represent the Lower Saxony state archive in regard to the determining and accepting of materials to be archived, and in regard to the preservation of the archive materials (§§ 3 + 4 NArchG). In addition, further details are regulated in the administrative provisions of the NArchG.

Besides that, the university began governing their archiving work using their own archive regulations for the first time in 1996. The archive regulations were amended in 2007. The archive regulations explicitly refer to the NArchG and associated administrative regulations.

The Hanover university archive is also responsible for integrating the administration of pre-archiving records, which is regulated in the filing regulations of the Lower Saxony government authority and described more concretely in the procedures of the LUH for filing.