This vagueness had an adverse impact, despite the fact that important cultural figures served as directors, including Gheorghe Asachi, Ion Heliade Rădulescu and Grigore Alexandrescu.

This is usually considered the point at which the modern Archives were established; in 1864, following the secularization of monastery estates in Romania, its collections were enriched as the state took over a significant number of documents.

After Transylvania entered the Habsburg Empire in 1688, methods of document preservation gradually improved, notably through the introduction of registers at the chief administrative institutions.

Thus, at the end of the 19th century, documents pertaining to Transylvania, as well as the Banat and Bukovina, were centralised at the state archives in Budapest (Országos Lévéltár) and Vienna (Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv).

[7] After Romania expanded in 1918 at the end of World War I, State Archives were established in three newly acquired historical regions: at Cluj in 1920 for Transylvania, at Cernăuţi in 1924 for Bukovina and at Chişinău in 1925 for Bessarabia.

[7] In 1951, during the early Communist period, the State Archives Directorate passed under the control of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Soviet organisational model was adopted.