The National Records Office
The National Records Office is the national institution charged with preserving the government archive and Sudanese documents of all kinds — official records, manuscripts and historical documents — and is considered one of the oldest records offices in the Arab and African region. Its roots go back to 1916, when the British administration began thinking of a central body to gather financial papers and organize them; in the early 1920s the interest expanded to include judicial correspondence. In 1948 the Sudan Records Office was established and a special committee administered its affairs; alongside official documents it gathered private documents held by individuals and families. After independence, the Central Records Office Act of 1965 was issued, and the office took that name, with its tasks and the rules for acquiring documents defined; the law was then amended in 1982 so the office became a body with legal personality under its current name, administered by a national council and an executive apparatus headed by a secretary-general, and a new law was later issued in 2005 expanding its powers. The office's holdings include documents from the eras of the Sultanate of Sennar and the Kingdom of Darfur, and Mahdist documents, which form its largest collections, as well as records of the Condominium period and of the national governments since the country's independence on January 1, 1956, in addition to collections of daily newspapers, photographs, manuscripts, university theses and maps; its holdings are estimated at about thirty million documents. Its work is distributed among specialized departments for collecting documents, sorting and appraising them, preserving and cataloguing them and serving researchers in the reading room, maintenance, restoration and binding, technology, documentation and electronic archiving, training and public relations, and financial and administrative affairs — making it the first reference for researchers into Sudan's modern history.
(Sources: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia — entry: National Records Office (Sudan); Sudan News Agency (SUNA) via Sudaress)
— Editorial Team
