The ESA Archives is closing its celebrations for 50 years with a new way to present our collections to the outside world! As the finale to this anniversary, and in response to an increasing number of requests from external users, it will take the form of a special long-term project to make public the file plan of the collections of material in the ESA Archives at the European Centre for Space Records, giving you a flavour of the content of our physical and digital holdings.
What do we mean by file plan? In archival terminology a file plan is a hierarchical classification scheme used to group records based on the relationship that links them to their contexts. It therefore reflects an organisation's functions and activities through its documents.
Work will commence in 2026, feeding into our continuing efforts to promote ESA’s heritage and legacy, and will concentrate on the ESA fonds and sub fonds that are held at the ECSR. The final objective is to produce a plan of its division into over 20 sub-fonds and various series, which take in all ESA Programmes and their related activities. This will additionally be accompanied by information on the history of the collections and descriptions of the material in each including provenance, scope, date and extent.
To help us know which areas to focus on first, we need input from our stakeholders and if you are reading this, you are one of them! We would love to hear from you with your feedback on what would you like to know about the physical content in the Archives: the kind of material you are most interested in, and what information you would like to be able to consult.
To whet your appetite and give you the wider context, there are six main ‘fonds’ which comprise the ESA Archives in its entirety (for ESA and for its predecessors COPERS, CETS, ELDO, ESC and ESRO) and which exist across two different physical locations in Italy – in Florence and Frascati.
The majority of the ESA fonds are held at the ECSR in ESRIN, the centralised repository for technical documentation related to ESA projects and missions since 2002, and also home to all the administrative documentation of ESA since the closure of the HQ intermediate archives in 2017.
The file plan project will make detailed information on the ECSR collections available via this website for the first time, complementing and augmenting the information on the fonds for ESA’s predecessors which are held at the Historical Archives of the European Union (HAEU), based at the European University Institute in Florence.
Please write to us at Archive.Services@esa.int with your thoughts and suggestions and follow our progress next year!
More information
Links to the fonds at HAEU