When the European Communities were established, paper records from their institutions were not accessible to the public. However, as early as the late 1950s, access to the the documents produced by the European institutions was put to discussion, as the document on the right exemplifies. In response to requests from the members of the European Parliamentary Assembly as well as from European civil servants, the secretariat of the Councils of the EEC and Euratom discussed procedures for consulting and communicating archival materials related to the Treaties of Rome. Nevertheless, it would take several more decades before these documents became available to researchers and the general public, reflecting a new shift toward increased transparency in European institutions.

After rising pressure from contemporary historians for access to documents, in 1983 the decision was taken to open institutional records to the public. The Council of the European Communities emphasised a dual objective for rendering its archives public: to encourage research and to foster public interest in the history of European integration, and to shed more light on the workings of the European institutions.