Despite the long-awaited passage of the Archives Law in November -- that mandates the government to make records available to the public for the first time -- officials said yesterday public examination of documents would not be allowed until indexing was completed within the next two years.
Under the Archives Law, national records must be declassified automatically after 30 years, unless the legislature grants an extension due to extenuating circumstances.
Applications for examination of records that are less than 30 years old will need to be approved by a national archives management committee, according to the new law.
The law also requires that a specialized agency must be set up within two years, under the central government, to manage the archives.
Wea Chi-lin (
Wea said the records that have raised the most concern include those related to the political persecution during the White Terror period in the 1950s and the Kaohsiung Incident of 1979.
At the recent 20th anniversary commemoration of the Kaohsiung Incident, DPP legislators said they would request the files related to the crackdown to uncover hidden facts and expose those involved in any wrong doing.
Wea said that during the transition period before the National Archives Bureau was set up, the government was not ready to serve the public, though applications from the Legislative Yuan would still be considered.
Wea said this arrangement had been made because the there was a lot of preparatory work to do, such as the indexing of documents, computerizing them and retraining the staff.
Presently the documents are stored in a variety of agency locations. A survey of three quarters of the agencies in June 1997 showed that over 50 million copies of permanent archives were available.
One quarter of the agencies did not respond primarily because the number of documents was so huge that they could not make an exact count.
"We believe the number of documents may have grown to some 80 million by now," Wea said.
Wea said his commission had notified all agencies to start classifying their documents and not to destroy them.
"Some government documents might have been lost already because storage wasn't mandated in the past," Wea admitted.
Under the Archives Law, the destruction of documents that are intended for storage is subject to imprisonment of up to two years.
DPP lawmaker Lin Cho-shui (林濁?? said a common problem for government agencies had been the lack of modern technology to manage the documents as well as the fact that a systematic method of storing them was never implemented.
Hsueh Li-Kuei (薛2z桂), a professor of library and information science at the National Chengchi University, suggested that the government recruit professional people trained in library science to handle the job of declassifying the documents.
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