The core of the holdings held in the Bad Homburg town archive are the records of the town administration.
In recent centuries, the volume of documents created in public administrations, in business and society and in the private lives of individuals has grown significantly.
Administrations and archives are therefore increasingly faced with a "mass problem". Because not everything can be preserved and made usable for future generations, every archive has to make a selection. This is based on an archival evaluation, which then forms the basis for the archiving or destruction of documents.
On the one hand, legal protection must be taken into account, and on the other, consideration must be given to which documents will provide the most comprehensive possible picture of our present for urban history research over the coming centuries. It is not chance, but a conscious decision, made as objectively as possible according to professional standards, that determines whether documents are kept or destroyed.
Archival science has developed formal and content-related criteria and methods for this.
In order to document both the public and private life of our time, documents from individuals and families, clubs and associations, local political parties, citizens' initiatives and companies are also collected. Private letters, diaries, estates, business correspondence, photos, picture postcards and posters can be found in the town archive.
This addition to the archive holdings is all the more important as the social life of the city and its citizens can only be documented incompletely via municipal administrative records.
The term "records" does not only refer to paper documents. It includes all information regardless of the type and form of its carrier. The Hessian Archive Act mentions, for example, "deeds, official books, files, documents, official publications, card indexes, maps, plans, posters, seals, stamps, image, film and sound recordings as well as all other information objects, including digital recordings, regardless of their storage form".
The transition to the digital age also brings new challenges for the city archive. More and more documents are being created exclusively digitally and must be evaluated and archived in this form. This applies to previously paper-based registers and official records (e.g. residents' registration and civil status registers) as well as data in electronic specialist procedures and files that are now only kept electronically in a so-called document management system.
Digital long-term archiving places special demands on the evaluation and transfer to the archive as well as the preservation of the legibility and interpretability of the archived data.
Information on almost 200 holdings, almost 40,000 archive records and almost 7,000 scans are available in the online finding aid. In future, the records will be gradually transferred to the Arcinsys Hessen database.
For centuries, documents that were important for safeguarding municipal rights and customs have been kept in the archives. It was not until the 19th century that research into the history of the town played a role in the selection of these documents.
Since the end of the 1980s, the archiving of documents has been regulated in the archive laws of the federal and state governments; municipal archives in Hesse have statutes on this basis that regulate their tasks and use. An archive is primarily responsible for the documents of its owner. This area of responsibility is called an archive district. The municipal archive is therefore initially the archive for the documents from the municipal administration as well as the municipal enterprises and companies.
According to the statutes and archive law, all documents created there must be offered to the city archive in their entirety for transfer if they are no longer required for ongoing administrative operations and are no longer subject to retention periods. The city archive takes over the documents that it considers to be worthy of archiving and then gives the offering body the go-ahead to destroy the other documents.
In doing so, the archivists always keep in mind the legal protection of citizens as well as the diverse interests of administration, science, local history and family research and private individuals.
