The National Archives Center Building-Rent at LBP 304 million and an urgent need for a new building
The National Archives Center was established in 1978 as a public institution affiliated with the Prime Minister’s Office and aimed at safeguarding the Lebanese heritage, both private and public, and store the materials that are printed, published and registered in Lebanon as well as anything branded as ‘archives’ in audio-visual media. The Center’s staffing table contains 76 posts, only 24 of which are occupied.
Rent of the Picadelli building
The following areas are rented by the National Archives Center in the Picadelli building in Hamra Street and are used to keep records:
- Seventh floor covering 650 m2
- 450m2 of the sixth floor
- Depot covering 750 m2
Cost
The annual cost of renting the said building is LBP 304 million distributed as follows:
- Rent: LBP 243 million
- Services and maintenance: LBP 25 million
- Parking: LBP 24 million
- Subscription to a power generator: LBP 12 million
- The cost of renting one square meter would thus be close to LBP 227,000 which although unreasonably high, is not the main problem.
Problem
Given the uninterrupted flow of materials from various administrations and institutions, the National Archives Center has become incapable of accommodating all new material due to restrictions on space, and furthermore, its lack of those standards required to render a facility suited to preserve archives and documents. For these reasons, administrations have been requesting the state for years to find special headquarters for the National Archives Center to help it carry out its functions. It has been estimated that premises of at least 10,000 m2 would be needed. This large area required meant abandoning the option of renting due to high costs. Instead, an option of finding a solution on constructing a building matching the required specifications on state-owned land in Beirut, with a possibility of expanding the area in the future, seems a better one.
The National Archives Center has been seeking a solution for this problem since 1994 and despite its appeals and follow-ups, no solutions have been figured out in the past 20 years. Today, in 2015, the crisis is still acute: failure to accommodate further archives and a fear of losing material believed by the public to be safely guarded and kept.
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