The Moravian State Archives has a new location with double the capacity

Brno - The Moravian Regional Archive (MZA) will gradually begin moving kilometers of documents from the current storage facilities to its new headquarters in Bohunice. The transfer of archival materials will take about two years, during which the reading rooms will also be closed until January. The new headquarters, costing 685 million crowns, will completely replace the current temporary facilities of the archive. Its capacity is nearly twice as high.
    The shelves in the higher reinforced concrete building with a red facade will accommodate approximately 110 kilometers of documents and books. The reading rooms in the glass section will have space for a hundred visitors.
    Archivists have noticeably lacked storage space until now. "The period will finally end when qualified archivists do everything from building shelves to constantly moving archival materials to highly specialized processing and research activities," pointed out the archive director, Kateřina Smutná.
    The MZA has previously been located in several places, and its reading rooms were in the Zemský house on Žerotínovo náměstí. However, these spaces had to be vacated for the regional office. The move to the new location will take about two years.
    The MZA has been searching for a suitable location for more than 60 years. However, most of the money received for construction since then had to cover other necessary costs - in the 1950s, there were constant relocations to newly assigned and soon withdrawn repositories, mainly castles, chateaus, and monasteries. In recent years, it was also about the renovation of documents damaged during floods in 1997 and 2002.