Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen

The Landesarchiv NRW (www.lav.nrw.de) evaluates, accepts, receives and catalogues documents on the history of the Land and its functional predecessors. It fulfils society's needs for historical information, transparency of administration and legal certainty.
Distributed across various regional departments (Rhineland, Westphalia, East Westphalia-Lippe), it safeguards archival materials across some 150 kilometres of shelving. The holdings of the Landesarchiv date back to the early Middle Ages, and come right up to the present. The range of the preserved documents extends from older official documents, official books, files and maps through to photographs, films, sound recordings and electronic records from the recent past.

Competences and priorities in the area of long-term preservation

The Archives Act states that the Landesarchiv NRW is responsible for the archiving of electronic documents relating to administration. It also advises authorities and courts on all matters concerning document management and the introduction of IT systems. Accordingly the main activities of the Landesarchiv lie in the field of records management and pre-archival processing tasks as well as the evaluation, ingest and archiving of electronic documents relating to administrative matters. In 2011 the Landesarchiv launched its own ingest system for electronic documents and became involved in the interdisciplinary "Digitales Archiv NRW" project for the Land.

Contact

Dr. Christoph Schmidt
Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen
Fachbereich Grundsätze
An den Speichern 11
48157 Münster
Christoph.Schmidt@lav.nrw.de
www.lav.nrw.de 
Phone +49 251 / 620 650 13
Fax +49 251 / 620 650 50