Acquisition
The archives of the Confederation, cantons and municipalities ensure the preservation of state records. The Confederation and most cantons regulate the corresponding procedures by law. The situation is quite different with private archives.
Supplementation of state files
Legal retention periods are mainly relevant for legal entities. Private owners are completely free to entrust their files to a professional archive or to destroy them. Thus the state perspective is privileged and a historiography from the perspective of the civil society is made more difficult.
Profiling and cooperation
State archives also collect documents from private ownership. However, for the so-called special archives, among which the Archives of Contemporary History is one, the safeguarding of private records is the core business. The Archives of Contemporary History regulates this in its collection profile (German). It cooperates closely with other special archives and with state archives in this area.