Historical Archive of the City of Cologne included copies of the protocols of the diets of the Hanseatic League. With the 1594 transfer, the Cologne archive became the most important repository of historical material concerning the Hanseatic League and thus concerning the history of Northern Germany in general, only matched by the municipal archives of Lübeck. On 27 February 1602, the city council ordered that books on jurisdiction and administration were to be systematically bought at the regularly held Frankfurt Book Fair. These were subsequently stored in the municipal archive and became the basis of the Cologne municipal library. The "Ratsbibliothek" was one of the few Cologne
Historical Archive of the City of Cologne of photographs on the history of art, architecture, culture and photography in Cologne and the Rhineland. The plan was to build the “safest and state-of-the-art city archive in Europe“ by 2017. After the decision of the city council, a detailed concept was worked out and approved. In 2013, in the context of the city's financial crisis, local political debate began to move towards re-considering this decision, and even to imposing a planning moratorium. Protests by local support groups as well as national archive organizations followed. In 2017, the total damage from the collapse was estimated at 1.2 billion euros. Before