Tasks

Until May 2005 the university archive was organised as central institution of the executive committee of the university and then became, as separate department, part of the organisation of the university library Hanover. The concept of the university archive was reorganised with an archival direction in September 2005.
 
As “memory bank” of the university and its predecessor institutions, the aim of the university archive is that its collections form a historically meaningful depiction of university tradition by documenting as many facets of university life as possible. These records serve the purpose of providing legal substantiation as well as serving as the basis for scientific and private research, and make a contribution to the university’s cultivation of identity and tradition.
 
The university archive is established as public archive in the framework of its legal foundations, and for this reason it strives, in the context of its terms of use, to make its collections accessible to everybody.

The Hanover university archive assumes the role of a public archive based on § 7 Par. (3) of the Niedersächsischen Archivgesetzes (i.e. Archive act of Lower Saxony) . This exception to the “sovereignty of the state archive” is an expression of the constitutionally based right to self administration of the university.

For this reason the university archive archives documents that have permanent value, which are generated in the process of university administration, the academic and student self-administration, the central institutions and faculties and the affiliated scientific institutes. These documents can be comprised of records, files and their attachments, indexes, plans, image carriers, film bases and sound carriers, seals and stamps, and machine-readable media as well as information and programmes which are machine-readable on these (including systems and methods used to evaluate the documents). Collections of image and poster material, bequests from people affiliated with the university, prints and other sources of information (e.g. audio-visual media) from academic life supplement these stocks by varying degrees.

At the beginning of the archiving process is the evaluation. Here it is determined which parts of the records, taking numerous aspects into account, are to be preserved. The material which is deemed as worthy of archiving is then to be prepared for integration into the university archives. There, in the process of recording, the materials to be archived are integrated into a systematic structure of collections and electronically listed in order to be – if applicable, following the expiry of retention/blocking periods – available for convenient use. The ongoing safeguarding of the archived materials is ensured through preventative, conservational or restorative measures in the course of maintaining the collections. Ultimately the archive itself participates in the evaluation of the material in the form of various kinds of publications.

In addition the Hanover university archive provides an important service to all offices affiliated with the university that maintain a filing system:
Regular sorting out of materials brings to light redundant overlapping records and documents which are not worthy of being archived. This is how the numerous and often disorganized old filing systems are cleansed and valuable space is generated in service and storage rooms. This systematic processing also makes it easier for the offices who originally provided the material to access old files, and thus saves time.

The legal foundation on which the administration and archiving of documents at the LUH is based is binding for all offices which are integrated organisationally in the university.
 
Normally the entirety of the documents generated must be provided to the university archive (mandatory submission) as soon as they are no longer required for the purposes of ongoing services; normally this occurs when the retention periods expire. For this purpose, the documents are compiled in submission lists and passed to the university archive which decides which of the records are to be accepted as worthy of archiving, and which are to be sent to be destroyed in an ordered way, in compliance with privacy issues.
 
This evaluation represents one of the central but simultaneously most difficult tasks of the archive: Legal substantiation aspects are to be observed (provision of proof material); the collections are preferably to document all areas of the university and hereby remain open for future, possibly yet unknown issues which are part of university or scientific historical research; multiple, redundant materials (e.g. minutes of university body meetings) must be detected and eliminated; according to the natural principles of an archive, the development of the collections only sees material added and none taken away, which means that the available space is a valuable resource which becomes more scarce over the course of time. That is why the work of evaluation accordingly seeks to acquire the largest possible historical significance while taking on the smallest possible amount of documents.
 
In the next step, two lists are generated from the processed list of submissions: An additions list (from the perspective of the archive: an accession list) including the records which will be accepted by the university archive, and a list which is valid as proof of the proper destruction of the documents which were not accepted; the submitting office receives a copy of both lists. The documents which are accepted are now treated as archive material and initially go to the incoming storage where they can be located at any time using the accession lists.
 
The aim, however, is to integrate the incoming material in a classification system for collections which takes the origins of the documents into account (principle of provenance), as well as the  content analysis using archiving software. The analysis can vary in intensity and detail depending on the material and research requirements. This database, or respectively the excerpts or printouts in the form of inventory lists generated from it, are to make research in the collections as efficient and convenient as possible. Here it is also recorded whether and for how long records are to be blocked from use since the privacy retention periods vary depending on the content of the records. For example, records concerning people have considerably longer privacy retention periods than records pertaining to a subject. However, the office which submitted the records receives a right to unrestricted access to records which do not pertain to people.
 
In contrast, stocks in collections and bequests cannot be processed in such a systematic way. Here, the development is rather characterized by targeted procurements and the arbitrary transmission of materials, for which the results are hardly possible to forecast. Nevertheless collection stocks represent a valuable documentation of university life which is often more representative than that which can be attained purely through the records from the administrative areas.