A prior condition for transfering is that the records first be submitted to a strict selection procedure. Apart from the acquisition from public institutions in accordance with the Public Records Act, the State Archives also seek to obtain records of private individuals, families, institutions, associations and societies which have played an important role in social life. The permanent conservation of the records requires that they be kept in specially equipped repositories which conform to strict standards of temperature, air humidity and fire and flood security. The records themselves are stored in acid-free files and boxes which are labelled for identification purposes. In order to help public agencies on this point the State Archives makes acid-free boxes available at extremely low prices.
Records deteriorating in the course of time have to be repaired and restored.
Special care will have to be devoted in the very near future to the creation of electronic records in the form of machine-readable databases, the transfer of which to the State Archives is being prepared. The arrangement and description of the records is primarily the responsibility of the records-producing administrations, who may only transfer their records in good order and accompanied by an inventory. Nevertheless, there still resides in the State Archives an immense quantity of barely accessible records. It is one of the main tasks of the research personnel to make this accessible. The making of finding aids results in a broad range of products, ranging from the research guides , in which the use of certain holdings or of certain types of documents is explained, through archive directories , describing the totality of holdings of a State Archives repository are described in a concise manner, to inventories in which the archival items are described and presented in a scientifically ordered manner.