Abstract:

The easy re-use of information produced by the public sector holds the potential to deliver substantial benefits. The documentation that public institutions produce or receive in their course of work is an important resource. Ensuring its affordable or free of charge use can bring economic, social, political, educational, and scientific benefits to every state and society that manages to utilise it. After 2013, historical archives also had to open their collections and facilitate their re-use. In reality this is not a new subject for the archives. After the French Revolution, they became increasingly accessible to citizens and the records they preserve were re-used – for a purpose beyond that for which they were created – such as historical research, but now the archives will have to make an extra effort and provide their archival collections in digital form and in open format.

The purpose of this report is to present the legal framework for the provision of records produced by the public sector for re-use in a general European context. This will be implemented through a brief analysis of the three directives of the European Parliament and the Council in this direction – the legal documents from 2003, 2013 and 2019. The last two documents are directly related to the historical archives in the European Community. Second, will be presented the implementation of these directives in Bulgaria.

Third, the specific actions of the Bulgarian historical archives regarding the implementation of the measures outlined in the directives to facilitate the re-use of records will be presented as well. In this respect, the Bulgarian archives have not yet achieved significant results and much work remains to be implemented to clarify the objectives of the directives. Specific archival policies and measures need to be developed to prepare records for even easier use, both by researchers and citizens, but also something especially important – they need to be easy to use by software applications and artificial intelligence.

Keywords:

Re-use of information, historical archives, researchers, artificial intelligence.