Central Archives
The documents stored in the files of the Central Archives cover a period from 1910 to 2002.
The structuring into series and subseries has reconstructed the original grouping of the papers governed by the titulary established by service order no. 5 of 12 January 1956.
It prescribed that the central archive functioned ‘under the immediate authority of the General Affairs Office; the files to be kept in the archive itself must be marked with the special code AC, which will be affixed by the head of the General Affairs Office according to the directives that will be given to him from time to time. As a general rule, acts concerning legislative measures on the organisation of the Institute and statistical services, relations with other public administrations, the supply of statistical data abroad, congresses, conferences and national and international study commissions, as well as acts and documents concerning censuses and new current surveys, including the templates and in general anything that may be of interest for the history of development and the national statistical system, must be archived and marked with this acronym.
The location of the files in the archive, i.e. the archival position of the files themselves, is identified by the first pair of digits of the classification, which, as mentioned above, designates the subject. For each subject, files, inserts and the like are formed, arranged by entity according to the second pair of digits of the classification and the particular entities included in each group are arranged alphabetically by entity.”
The organisation of the papers according to the first pair of digits was respected, while the allocation of the institution indicated by the second pair of digits was more rarely observed.
Moreover, each folder contained a highly variable number of subfolders. Since a level of analyticity had to be established in the description of this section, it was decided to file the folder by indicating the title given on the label or, when missing, attributing a new one deduced from its contents.
Local archives
According to Service Order No. 5 of 12 January 1956, local archives have the function of preserving, ‘… normally for a limited time, files of special interest to the various services’.
For local archives, the series are sometimes identified with the name of each producing office. Given the frequency with which the offices have changed their names, sometimes retaining or varying the functions they performed, exhausting their function and being suppressed or merged with other offices, we have chosen to adopt the most recent name attested by the papers.
The documentation was described according to the type and method of preservation of the material examined, limiting itself, where this was deemed sufficient, to a description of the folders, and going down to a more analytical level (i.e. to the file) when necessary.
In reconstituting the series, many gaps were often found: it is conceivable that some of the documentation was lost in the course of the numerous relocations.
When reorganising the documents of a single office or service that arrived in the archive as a result of successive transfers, it was generally preferred to proceed by arranging the files or folders in strict chronological order; in other cases, the series were organised into subseries, thus bringing together the papers according to the subjects dealt with or the activity carried out by the office.
In other cases, however, the documents have been organised by keeping them separate according to the subject matter or activity carried out by the office. The different choices were dictated by various considerations: often the documents found had no external conditioning that could help in recovering the original order, and the classification of the papers was often sporadic or absent; there are many chronological gaps in the documentary series; in fact, given the highly contingent nature of the papers kept in the local archives, dispersion or destruction cannot be ruled out.
This sometimes makes it difficult to define the documentary collections found as true archival series: it is no coincidence that the papers of the local archives were often organised into sets called “Miscellaneous”
during the reorganisation phase. Both in the central archive section and in that of the local archives there are series that do not respect a strict chronological order in the arrangement of the files, but preserve the stratification in which the various segments of documentation arrived in the archive.
The most substantial deposits in the Historical Archives of Istat were those of the Presidency Office and the Accounting Service.
The local Presidency fund consists of the documentary sedimentation of the practical, administrative and legal activities carried out by the incumbent Presidents in the performance of their institutional functions from 1926 to 2004.
Given the consistency of the documentary material and in order to maintain the original relationship between the documents produced by the Presidents in office at Istat, it was decided to subdivide the Presidential Local Archive fund into sub-funds named after the respective Presidents, and to include among these also the minutes of the Higher Statistics Council.
Currently, the only archival complex of which it has been possible to reconstruct the original titulary is that of President Guido Maria Rey, whose papers show traces of the classification system adopted by his office.
As far as the Local Archive of the Accounting Service is concerned, the reorganisation was carried out trying to reflect the systematic activity of accounting registration of ISTAT’s financial, economic and patrimonial acts carried out by the Service, in order to restore the original order that the archive had in its active phase and the relationships between the documents.
The method chosen therefore took into account the complexity of the functions, the quantity of the material found and the procedures implemented by the individual offices of the Service.
Consult the files of the funds in the Historical Multimedia Archive