Research on the Attitudes of the Directors of Croatian State Archives to Planning and Implementing Volunteer Management

Croatian archives have stayed out of the spotlight for the most part, opting to use government subsidies as a crutch to help them go about their business without paying much attention to economic realities. As a terrifying result, archive repositories are fraught with data and records that have not been properly sorted out and made available for public use yet. To make things worse, few citizens feel like paying the local archives a visit as they are not sure what value they might get for their time. This paper deals with a twofold approach (legislation and education) to getting archives management up to date with modern practice and also reveals why Croatian archives have been slow to change, unable to cope with their biggest setbacks. Empirical data suggest managers are ill-equipped to run a volunteer management programme, let alone carry out basic PR activities to let taxpayers know for what services they are funding the archives. According to survey results, managers would very much like to be taught how to make their tenure more successful. The paper is also ground breaking in that no other research has been done before on Croatian archives being in tune with the modern practice of volunteer management