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Let Your Eminence give orders throughout each and every province that a public building be allocated, in which building the magistrate is to store the records, choosing someone to have custody over them so that they may remain uncorrupted and may be found quickly by those requiring them, and let there be among them an archives, and let that which has been neglected in the cities be corrected.
Emperor Justinian, as quoted in T.R. Schellenberg’s book Modern Archives