UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as Ev.1624-ii

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

CULTURE, MEDIA AND SPORT committee

 

 

caring for our collections

 

 

Tuesday 31 OCTOBER 2006

DR CLIVE FIELD, MS LYNNE BRINDLEY, MR DAVID THOMAS

and MR NICK KINGSLEY

 

MR ALISTAIR McCAPRA, MR JONATHAN PEPLER and MS RUTH SAVAGE

 

MS AMANDA NEVILL, MS HEATHER STEWART, DR FRANK GRAY,

DR LUKE McKERNAN, VISCOUNTESS HARRIET BRIDGEMAN

and MS PANDORA MATHER-LEES

Evidence heard in Public Questions 55 - 130

 

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Culture, Media and Sport Committee

on Tuesday 31 October 2006

Members present

Mr John Whittingdale, in the Chair

Philip Davies

Mr Nigel Evans

Mr Mike Hall

Alan Keen

Mr Adrian Sanders

Helen Southworth

________________

Memoranda submitted by the British Library and The National Archives

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Ms Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive, Dr Clive Field, Director, British Library, Mr David Thomas, Director of Collections, and Mr Nick Kingsley, Head of National Advisory Service, The National Archives, gave evidence.

Chairman: Good morning. This is the second session of the Committee's inquiry into caring for our collections. This morning we shall be looking principally at archives. I welcome Lynne Brindley and Clive Field, chief executive and director of the British Library, and David Thomas and Nick Kingsley, director of collections and head of the National Advisory Service of The National Archives.

Q55 Philip Davies: At the end of its submission The National Archives says that archives are the poor relations in terms of funding and support of the cultural sector, yet they are probably the fastest growing in popularity as a result of recent media interest and potentially those cultural sources are most likely to transform lives. How might archives shed their image as the poor relation in the cultural sector?

Mr Kingsley: That is a very good question. I think that the archives sector has been working quite hard in recent years to shed the pervasive image of dust which symbolises archives. Anyone who has been to see a modern records office will realise that dust plays a very small part in that world. Opening up the doors and trying to ensure that the wider public has a better understanding of what happens in the archives world is a major part of that. You will be aware of the phenomenal success of the television series "Who Do You Think You Are?" and other programmes that have taken archives as their starting point for telling stories. I think that those have brought archives to a much broader audience than ever before, and that is a significant part of it. At local level archive services have been making strenuous efforts to open their doors to a greater extent and get out there and tell stories to the wider public through programmes about their activities and new initiatives which respond to the Government's broader cultural agenda, for example programmes with a social inclusion and educational focus, trying to get archives in various forms used more in schools. Those are the things which will help to modernise the image of the archives service, but they all represent new activity on top of things which the archive services cannot stop doing if they are to continue to serve their core customers. There is, therefore, inevitably a financial pressure associated with that.

Q56 Philip Davies: Is it inevitable that archives will be perceived as a rather boring part of culture, or is there innovation in the pipeline which can make it far more sexy for the average punter and encourage him to want to gain access to it?

Mr Thomas: Over the past few years archives have put a huge amount of energy and resources into making their catalogues and digital copies of records available on line. By doing that I think that we are very much in tune with the way younger people discover information. We are in Google world and people use the Internet increasingly. At The National Archives far more use is made of our online resources and digital records and catalogues than we have physical visitors, although the number of people who come to the archives increases year on year. Last week we had our busiest time ever. Perhaps the image of dust is a bit overplayed.

Q57 Philip Davies: What can the Government do to stop you from being seen as the poor relation of the cultural sector? What would you like to see happen?

Mr Kingsley: Most of the areas of concern that we have raised in our written evidence come down to the need for additional resources. I am not necessarily saying that those resources have to come directly or indirectly from government, although that would be very nice. There are other ways in which government can help. One of them in particular is to try to provide encouragement for the sort of private philanthropy that has been an important source of funding for American archive institutions, for example. Another would be to look at changes in the tax regime which can potentially encourage the transfer of privately-owned archive material to public custody without the need for archive services to raise large sums of money to purchase those collections. There are already routes such as the acceptance-in-lieu procedure which do that very effectively, but they operate only in certain circumstances and not all potential vendors are able to benefit.

Q58 Philip Davies: In my admittedly short time on this Committee I have yet to hear a witness who has not asked for more resources in one form or another. Can you be more specific? How much extra do you believe needs to be pumped into it, and what would that money deliver? What would be lost by not putting in that money?

Mr Kingsley: It is very difficult to quantify it exactly for the nation as a whole. The sum mentioned in the report of the archives task force as one that would make a potentially significant difference to the sector was about £12 million which is fairly small beer in terms of overall government expenditure. The most expensive things that need to be done are capital investments, namely the provision of new fit-for-purpose archive facilities. We say in our evidence that perhaps as much as 50% of the total archival stock is in accommodation that is not fit for purpose. A typical county record office probably costs about £10 million to build, so there are significant investment requirements in the longer term, but relatively small sums of money would potentially unlock interesting and important programmes of work. Different areas of activity require different levels of investment. One could look at making a significant difference to the proportion of archive catalogues that are on line for £2 or £3 million. If one wanted to make a serious impact on the cataloguing backlogs of archive services the cost would be rather more. If one wanted to address the potential for wider educational use and social value of archives those projects could be run on a number of different scales from a few tens of thousands of pounds upwards. It is a matter of finding sources of revenue from which one can operate at different scales to fit different purposes.

Mr Thomas: In addition to government funding, in recent years we have worked increasingly with the private sector. All the UK censuses of population for England and Wales are now available on line from 1841 to 1901 as a result of private sector partnership arrangements. We need to explore further the possibilities of private sector funding in this area.

Q59 Philip Davies: What is the view of the British Library about archives not being made the poor relations of the cultural sector?

Ms Brindley: The first point to make is that archives are also contained in libraries, so the boundaries are blurred. The exposure to the much wider public which has been so successfully done through the television series is a great advance and one disputes that archives are still dusty. They are certainly on line. Our experience, too, is that digitally there is a lot more interest from a very wide public. For example, we have the records of the India Office and they are of enormous interest to the Asian population in terms of their own family histories. There is a growing interest.

Dr Field: There are now numerous manifestations of archives. We tend to think of archives as dusty old minute books from organisations long gone, but obviously with the digital revolution there are whole new classes of archives. Clearly, one of the things that we are labelling as archiving is the work that we are leading with The National Archives and other players in terms of selectively trying to archive the UK web presence. You will hear later about the exciting developments and potential in the whole world of film heritage. If you like, for many archives conjure up an unduly restrictive notion of what is subsumed within them, but I emphasise that archives and manuscripts are central to the work of the British Library. We focus largely on archival materials of national significance, because obviously we have a distributive archival system in the country and records of local and regional significance are most appropriately held there.

Q60 Mr Hall: I am a reader at The National Archives and I have been going there for many years. I do not believe that it is at all dusty. The building is a modern one and has fantastic technology with access to primary source documents. You have a world of people out there who get pleasure in researching family histories, apart from anything else. Mr Thomas, you mentioned the fact that the censuses from 1841 to 1901 are on line. I know that this is not part of our inquiry, but what is your view about getting the 1911 census on line now?

Mr Thomas: Thank you for that question. Government policy is that the census should remain closed for 100 years, so we are expecting the 1911 census to be released in 2012.

Q61 Mr Hall: We cannot wait!

Mr Thomas: Application has been made to the information commissioner to see a particular entry in the 1911 census and we await his decision within 28 days. That is as far as I am prepared to go.

Q62 Mr Hall: That is probably fair enough given that that is not what we are inquiring about. I have been looking at my grandfather's military career in World War I. Because of the microfilm records available at the National Archives I have been able to establish that he was Private Thomas McBride PW443 of the 18^th Battalion, Middlesex Regiment. The microfilm is not very good and some of the original documents - receipts for medals from World War I - have now been stored and sealed for a period of time in the hope that future technology will allow us to get better images. Is that correct?

Mr Thomas: Absolutely. The original World I records of service are in a very poor condition and only about 25% or 35% of the original survive, so you are quite lucky to find those records.

Q63 Mr Hall: I was delighted.

Mr Thomas: We hope in future to be able to digitise the images and make them available in better quality. The microfilming was done with a lottery grant and it was the best technology available at the time, but I certainly take your point of view. We hope that the technology will get better and we can produce better quality images in the future.

Q64 Mr Hall: Has digital technology increased or decreased the security of the archives in terms of the process of digitising the images and preserving the original documents?

Mr Thomas: I would not say that it has made a huge difference in terms of security. We have been microfilming records since the 1960s so we have always had surrogate copies of the most popular records. We have done that for conservation reasons. If we had not microfilmed the records of soldiers from World War I they just would not exist any more, if people saw the originals. What digital technology has done is to make stuff available all over the world. If one is in Australia, South Africa, Belize or whatever and one wants a census record one can get it straight away on line. That has been a big revolution and also a huge conservation boon because it means that we can protect the original records.

Q65 Mr Hall: You are able to protect the original records without any deterioration. The images are in digital form and they are universally available?

Mr Thomas: Absolutely.

Q66 Mr Hall: What do you do about back-ups?

Mr Thomas: At the moment we make back-up tapes and store them at a secure offsite location. That is okay for the moment, but what we need is a long-term preservation programme for the back-up of the digital images. That is something on which we hope our colleagues in the digital preservation area will start to work this year. We have invested all this money in digitisation, but as the technology changes we want to be able to migrate those images to the latest generation of technology so they are still readable.

Q67 Helen Southworth: We are talking about ease of access. Can you give us an indicator of the sort of change that the digital revolution has made in terms of accessing? I have experienced the difference between having to get the time and resources to get to London to access records and what happens today. I know that Mr Hall has accessed these records because he told me about it when walking down the corridor. The world has changed from the requirement to put aside three days and spend a couple of hundred pounds to be able to look at the records to the need to put aside just a quarter of an hour to access records via a computer, but is that just for us? Who is accessing them? How widespread is this change?

Mr Thomas: The change has been huge. I can write to you and give you the exact figures, but there are more people accessing our website and resources on line than come to Kew. The really big change has been in catalogues. Until a few years ago if one wanted a catalogue at The National Archives one would have to go to Kew and search through it in a slow and painstaking way. Now all the catalogues are on line and one can search through them with a search tool that gives one what one wants very quickly. Similarly, in an increasing number of local record offices catalogues have been made available on line. They are searchable with a common search tool so one can find what one wants very quickly. That has been a huge change. Now people come to Kew with pieces of paper and say that they want certain records that they have identified via the Internet, whereas before they would come along and say they are interested in a certain subject and perhaps spend a couple of days desperately trawling through our typewritten catalogues. We have had some additional funding to help with cataloguing locally, and that has really improved the situation for researchers; and another big aspect is that it is available all over the world.

Q68 Helen Southworth: Has the geography changed in terms of where people are accessing archives? Have the demographics changed? Are you opening up things through the digital revolution, or are the same people able to get more?

Mr Thomas: The indication is that we are certainly opening up things. I cannot answer that precisely at the moment but I can provide you with more information later, if that is acceptable. We have always served a very broad demographic profile, not just a small group of academic historians. We serve huge numbers of people who are interested in the history of their own families. Quite a lot of people who came from overseas to the United Kingdom are interested in their family histories, and people are also interested in local history. Therefore, a very broad spectrum of society uses the archives.

Dr Field: Our experience at the British Library has been very similar. Certainly I would underline the point that the ready availability across the world of information about what is in our collections has been a major transformational change. We are not quite in the same position as Mr Thomas in that about two-thirds of our archives are now in the form of online catalogues. Because of our access strategy, which is a combination of people being able to visit our reading rooms and also order material remotely, obviously within the constraints of copyright law, the fact that we are making those catalogues available in that way enables them to order items for collection. In many cases the catalogues themselves have huge research significance. For example, yesterday the British Library launched the definitive world catalogue of all publications in English before 1801. That is now available as a free resource to everyone. In the past this resource was available only by subscription and it would have been used largely only by people studying history. Because of the research potential available through the new generation of catalogues it will now literally be available to many people who will never come to the British Library but for whom the catalogue itself will be important.

Ms Brindley: The catalogue itself is great but it is also about digitisation of content, because if one is sitting at home one wants the real thing. In parallel, we are making enormous efforts to digitise and we are doing that with grant funding. This Committee made a previous recommendation that this should not be done at the expense of our core collecting. Therefore, we fund raise for it and get grants for it. For example, we are working in partnership with Microsoft. At the moment we are digitising out-of-copyright material - because copyright is a separate issue - in the form of several million pages of newspapers. We have recently launched about 4,000 hours of sound. This is great research material but it is also fantastic for school children, education and all of us who are just curious.

Q69 Helen Southworth: What is the potential for commercial sponsorship of digitisation? What are the issues about who then holds copyright of the digitised material?

Dr Field: We have had experience of both. Some of our most scholarly resources, which will have limited impact, have been dealt with essentially as commercial initiatives where the market is largely perceived to be a few scholarly research libraries around the world. Others have been done on a completely open access model, which obviously is very attractive to us if we can get the funding not simply to do digitising but to provide the long-term sustainability of that resource. What we are now doing as an interesting experiment in terms of an online newspaper resource, which Ms Brindley indicated, where we have a significant challenge - there are 750 million pages of newspapers in the British Library's collections, of which about three million will be available by next summer - is to try to develop a hybrid business model which at least enables a good degree of free public access within the UK to higher and further education institutions, schools and public libraries. Therefore, it is not access necessarily to everybody, but we believe that the scale of investment required needs some innovation in terms of business and service models.

Ms Brindley: We are also very cautious about our public position in not giving exclusive arrangements or time-limited arrangements. This has been very interesting in our negotiations with Microsoft which this year is digitising 100,000 books from the British Library. That will go out freely on our website, but they will also be able to use that same material within their products. We have rigorous negotiations to ensure that long term this is a public asset of which we have stewardship. It is not just a matter of making it available. One of our biggest challenges is to build long-term digital preservation into the structure in the same way as TNA. One can make it available but one then needs to sustain it and ensure that it is available for ever. That is a big technological and financial challenge.

Q70 Helen Southworth: Looking at the national picture, what are the major issues in relation to archiving in terms of physical storage, conservation, cataloguing and access? Can you describe to us the more localised situation?

Mr Thomas: Perhaps I may deal first with the digital side and let Mr Kingsley deal with the other matters. In terms of digital preservation, The National Archives is developing a system which will take government records and hopefully preserve them for ever; it will migrate them to the next format as technology changes. Unfortunately, there has not been a similar development in the local archives sector and there are big concerns about what will happen to digital records locally. There have been a number of useful pilot projects. The Paradigm project is being run by the Universities of Oxford and Manchester. As to UK data archives, Essex has done a good pilot project with counties in the east of England. However, in general there are big issues about ensuring the survival of digital records in local authorities and local private collections. It is a complex matter and is not just about building a machine to preserve the stuff; it is about how you capture it in the first place and select what is worthy of long-term preservation, how it is catalogued and ultimately how you preserve it. That is one of the biggest concerns at the moment, but no doubt Mr Kingsley will tell you about others.

Mr Kingsley: Certainly, the digital aspect is very important. In addition to what has already been mentioned, we would flag up the difficulties that the transition to digital record-keeping poses for collecting archives and establishing contact at an appropriate point with the bodies whose records will ultimately be received so as to ensure that the ground work is laid to enable a smooth transition of records at some point in the future. On the broader question of areas of concern, we have recently piloted a self-assessment exercise for local authority archive services in England and Wales which has generated a very detailed picture of the pressures under which those services are operating. The picture varies considerably from place to place. Many services are doing quite well; others are really struggling. The matters that tend to cause trouble are, first and foremost, the accommodation and the limitations that that imposes. They may not have enough space for their collections, or for them to grow; they may not be offering an environment that is conducive to the preservation of that material in the longer term; they may not have the space to expand the range of activities that they would like to support in terms of education and outreach that they could potentially offer. There are also problems in some places with the documentation of collections, particularly the proportion of material that they have taken in which is as yet uncatalogued. Typically, about one quarter of the holdings of a local authority's archival services are uncatalogued. That will represent, depending on the size of the institution, a number of years' work by several tens of persons, so it is not an insignificant problem. There are also difficulties in some cases with services that face declining levels of financial support in the face of local authorities' overall financial situation. In those cases sometimes difficult decisions have had to be made which have impacted adversely on the range of services that can be offered. It is generally true to say that the wider archival sector, particularly in local government, has not been able to take advantage of the opportunities provided by the digital revolution as fully as The National Archives, British Library and some of the private sector institutions, like the Wellcome Foundation, which also operate in this field. There are significant challenges out there. One matter I should like to stress is the extent to which that pattern varies from place to place. One aspect that emerges most clearly from our self-assessment survey is that there is, in the hallowed phrase, a postcode lottery about the quality of archival services to be found in any given place. Because the typical user does not access just the records in the institution that serves the area where he or she happens to live - the research interest may take that individual to several different record offices in different parts of the country - that user becomes very aware of that. Some places are perceived as strong performers and others as offering a much weaker service, and there is no real justification for that apart from the financial context in which the providing local authority is operating.

Q71 Helen Southworth: I want to ask about the growth in popularity of archives which appears to be closely related to the growth in media coverage and IT access. Do you think that that has grown at the expense of preservation of the collections, or is it a zero sum gain?

Mr Kingsley: Not entirely. Archive services have managed to attract resources from a range of different sources, for example Heritage Lottery funds, private sector partners and other grants, to support programmes to open up archives, whether it be through digitisation or outreach programmes locally. It is not a totally zero sum gain. There has been some transfer of resources in many archive services from behind-the-scenes activities, as it were - cataloguing and conservation particularly - into supporting more front end activity, whether it be in the form of outreach programmes or simply servicing the public who come through the door. I suggest that it is a combination of the two.

Dr Field: Our approach would be very similar. One of the points that we have tried to make clear in our written evidence is that a long-term sustainability and stewardship of heritage collections in the country requires all of these things to be kept in an appropriate balance. We believe that the British Library has made significant progress over the past few years in trying to ensure that preservation, access and all of those other arguments about managing the stewardship of resources that it holds for the nation are adequately resourced; otherwise, one ends up with imbalances. One can put preservation in jeopardy, build up backlogs and so on.

Ms Brindley: Ultimately, there is no access without ensuring appropriate stewardship. As you have seen from the submission, there are particular challenges in relation to our newspapers. There is an enormous desire for access but there is a need even for some basic developments on quality of storage.

Q72 Helen Southworth: You made reference to the benefits that American archives derive from philanthropists. Can you tell us about some of the opportunities in that area, first in terms of the big donors?

Mr Kingsley: The first and obvious matter to point out is the funding which some American academic institutions have received to enable them to build collections of contemporary literary manuscripts. Just last week there was a major conference at the British Library entitled "Manuscripts Matter" which sought to draw attention to the importance of those collections and the fact that the papers of many UK-based authors find their way to American institutions that are able to operate in the marketplace far more effectively than most British institutions. They are able to do that simply because of the deep pockets that private donors have given them.

Q73 Helen Southworth: Is it just that America is a wealthier place and it is hard luck that this material goes there?

Mr Kingsley: No. As I understand it, the difference lies partly in the culture of giving which operates in the United States. That is itself informed by the taxation treatment given to institutions there. It provides a much greater encouragement for their sorts of cultural giving than is true in this country.

Dr Field: That matter was well developed by Sir Nicholas Goodison in his review and the serious recommendations that it made to the Treasury. I echo Mr Kingsley's point that in terms of acquisitions it is extremely difficult to get philanthropists to contribute to costs as happens in other countries like America. It is also now quite rare to be given collections. The British Library has received one or two very generous gifts - for example, the Oscar Wilde bequest by Viscountess Eccles - but that is extremely unusual. We have had some success in our capital programme on the centre for conservation which will open next spring. Although we have had money from the usual charitable and lottery sources we have also had some private donations, which we have graciously acknowledged, but it is very much an uphill struggle. We have seriously "professionised" our development effort in the British Library both in terms of skills and numbers. This is a big discussion. As you will know, certainly the acquisition end of the spectrum is ongoing with government at the moment and it is driven largely from the museums and galleries end of the spectrum, although I have to say that some of the acquisition challenges particularly for archival material are also pretty significant as well. On Friday last the British Library was offered a very important political archive - I hasten to add, not a contemporary one - for £1.6 million. It is clearly of national pre‑eminence and has been designated as such through the MOA procedures, but it is almost impossible to get funding from private sources for that. The culture is simply not there. Helen Southworth will be aware because of her involvement in one of our conferences on literary manuscripts of fairly early date that one of our discussion points with the Treasury is that although there are tax incentives available they do not extend to living authors so they can donate or sell material on favourable terms during their lifetimes. I think you have had written evidence from Lord Chris Smith's committee, of which we are very proud to be a member. It has put forward some modest proposals which we think would help in this regard. One of the things we heard at the conference at the British Library the week before last, to which Mr Kingsley alluded, was the very impressive gains made in Ireland over the past few years by way of a combination of lottery and tax incentivisation. One of the things that we fully intend to follow up with government is the strong suggestion that that is probably a model which is well worth looking at. It is a relatively small country of four million people but it has pulled in by targeted effort some very big collections of literary manuscripts. We continue strongly to push the proposals put forward to HM Treasury in this area.

Q74 Chairman: Obviously, digitisation offers advantages in terms of wider public access and also storage. You have talked about the physical constraints of storage. As your collection grows your bookshelves increase by kilometres. Is it your view that all material still needs to be preserved in hard copy form, even if you have digital copies?

Ms Brindley: First, it is a statutory requirement to collect everything that is published in the UK and preserve it for ever. I think we should be joyous that the UK publishing industry is so successful at one level, that is to say, there does not appear to be any significant diminution of print, whilst what we call born digital material as well as digitised material is increasing. In that sense I think that we have both of the problems simultaneously. As to whether the existence of digitised materials means that you do not need to keep the originals, I believe that we are a very long way from that. We see digitisation primarily as enabling widespread global access to the collections. There is not yet proven technology which enables us to say, hand on heart, that we can guarantee that that material will be available in hundreds of years. TNA and ourselves are working with the leading players in the world - to some extent we are ourselves leading - in developing systems which need quite significant investment, but it is developmental and it will be some years before we can say that that is the preferred preservation format. I am afraid that it is not an "either or"; at this stage it is, given the long transition, a "both and" problem.

Q75 Chairman: Therefore, there is no reason in principle, if the technology became sufficiently developed and you were confident that you would have a permanent digital record, why you should preserve a hard copy?

Mr Thomas: We are so far from that state. There are benefits from digitisation in that one can store material in a much more compressed and cheaper way, and obviously one does not have to handle it, but like the British Library we are a long way from a time when we would destroy anything because it has been digitised.

Dr Field: One has to say that for certain types of research one still needs to consult the artefact. To come back to my example of the pre-1800 printed corpus, there would be many elements of research that would still be enabled only by physical examination of the actual volume and not simply the image. Even in the contemporary world where superficially publications are made in two formats the content is far from identical. If one looked at an online version of a newspaper and compared it with what you could buy from WH Smith one would see significant variations in content, in some cases more in the print and in other cases more in the online version. One of the challenges in the digital publishing arena is that in some sense nothing is really static any longer. That is a particular challenge for us at the British Library in terms of our web archiving aspirations.

Chairman: I was not suggesting that you take a digital copy of Magna Carta and throw away the original.

Q76 Alan Keen: Very early this morning, probably when most of you were still asleep, I spent a couple of hours going through these submissions. It terrifies me. Philip Davies touched on it at the beginning when he asked what we would lose if we did not get the money that we needed. Apart from the good work that you are doing in extending the record, what are we in danger of losing?

Mr Thomas: From my point of view, the big danger is losing currently created digital records. There are clearly physical problems with records that are in some archives and problems about collections being sold and split up, but the really big danger is that some local authorities or other organisations create records digitally, as everybody does nowadays, and if procedures are not put in place to capture those there will be a dark ages covering the early years of this century simply because the material will go away. Unless adequate steps are taken to preserve it, it just will not be there in a few years. For me, the biggest risk is the loss of digital information and records that are being created digitally and people are not taking active steps to preserve them.

Dr Field: The British Library flagged that up in terms of working with Chris Smith and government in terms of getting the Legal Deposit Libraries Act on the statute book in 2003. We were warning of a new digital dark age. There is still a long way to go. Websites generally, particularly those not underpinned by commercial interests, are enormously fragile. We have been attempting over the past two years to archive them selectively, but because of copyright - we do not have secondary legislation under the 2003 Act - we have to seek voluntary permission in each case. We find that we have only a 25% success rate in terms of permission, so we cannot archive 75% of the material that we designate as being of likely permanent national interest because we do not have the powers to do that. We have flagged it up in connection with the work now started on creating a web archive around the 2012 Olympics which Members of the Committee may think is an entirely appropriate thing to do, but unless we can get the 100% rate that we need we will not do that. As we speak we are losing a lot of valuable material.

Mr Thomas: That is certainly true for the early history of the Internet. If one tries to find historic websites from about the end of 1996 they are very hard to locate and many do not survive, including some quite well known ones. That is a real example of what can be lost. The Internet is such a new and revolutionary thing that it would be nice to see what it looked like in the early days.

Q77 Alan Keen: They are the most important archives?

Mr Thomas: Yes.

Dr Field: But we would also say - this is confirmed by the work done by the National Preservation Office in terms of the surveys, of which we are very pleased to have been part - that there are pockets in terms of paper and other traditional forms of archives where there are significant problems. In the British Library our biggest concentration is undoubtedly in terms of our newspaper collections. In the surveys 15% of the materials currently are unusable and another 19% are in a hugely fragile state. Although we have an active surrogacy and digitisation programme, the scale of the problem is enormous. Our experience is that this is not just UK material but by default - no one asked us - we find that we are the custodians of a lot of the Commonwealth's newspaper heritage and that of a lot of other countries, including the US, because everyone got rid of the originals and assumed that we would continue to do that.

Q78 Alan Keen: I was surprised to read somewhere in these documents that there is a danger in storing stuff digitally, but that is not a technical problem, is it? What is the danger?

Ms Brindley: If one looks at the longevity formats, for example CDs, the industry says that they will last but tests have shown that what it means is perhaps five to 10 years. The business that we are in is measured in hundreds of years, so there is a physical medium issue. In addition, if one digitises material it needs to be refreshed as the formats change and the software needed to read it changes. It is a continuing and dynamic problem.

Dr Field: That requires both financial investment and also runs up against problems of the current intellectual property framework because, like colleagues in other information industries such as film, we do not necessarily have the statutory powers to enable us to work in the national interest to make these adjustments without express permission.

Mr Thomas: Ms Brindley is absolutely right. We are just at the start of digital preservation. There are hundreds and hundreds of theoretical articles about how to do it. What we need is 20 or 50 years' experience of actually doing it. That is the situation we are in.

Q79 Alan Keen: Surely, it must be possible to designate stuff that is copyrighted and you can store it without it being released or even accessed. Have you come across that?

Ms Brindley: That was one of the arguments in our submission to Gowers in the Internet copyright review. We are particularly concerned about sound because at the moment we cannot copy for preservation purposes that which is in copyright, which means effectively most of the 20^th century material. We have made a strong submission that technically there is a need to copy and recopy and we want to do it for the purposes of preservation, respecting that there would be limitations on access.

Dr Field: I do not know that one can completely separate preservation from access. For one thing, one needs to test one's preservation system to ensure that one can actually get the material out as opposed to a theoretical confidence that it can be accessed.

Q80 Alan Keen: In our new media inquiry that we are carrying out at the same time as this Google told us very confidently that in four years' time an iPod could contain all the music that had ever been recorded in the world. Surely, that technology which is speeding forward at a rate must be useful to you. Have you been given information as to how quickly the technology will improve?

Mr Thomas: Storage is certainly improving, but the problem is the technology required to read the stuff. As you know, the technology on one's computer desktop changes from time to time. What one has to do is migrate the stuff on one's iPod to some new format that can be read by current technology. That is the real challenge we face. If one recalls the Amstrad personal computer, the format has now completely changed and it has to migrate into the current desktop formats.

Q81 Mr Sanders: In terms of newspaper storage, you are trying to get some form of government contribution and you are also accessing a number of non-governmental sources. Have you approached the newspaper industry itself given that publishers, surely, have their own archives and there is a danger here of duplication?

Ms Brindley: We are following a multifaceted strategy. Because the problem is so big we are trying to break it down. First, it forms a very significant part of our bid into SR. This is a continuing programme. The DCMS has been very supportive of our wish to ensure that we have adequate storage. We hope to be able to continue to improve storage, including newspapers. As to access, we are beginning to get external money. Obviously, we are talking to the industry and have interesting relations with it. It is an industry with its own difficulties in terms of support. I think that it genuinely sees this as part of its total heritage as well as ours, but it is an industry that is struggling with its own future challenges in terms of the newspaper business. At the moment we are not having any huge success in getting resources from the industry.

Dr Field: Speaking generally of the publishing industry as a whole, if one takes the whole span of publishing from the late 15^th century to the way it now is publishers have not hugely invested in archiving. Indeed, very often when they create digital back files of materials published in print they will come to libraries like the British Library because they do not have complete and perfect runs. It is only in the area of digital publishing that they see sense in investing in archives, but that investment is underpinned only so long as there is deemed to be commercial potential in it. When it reaches the point where they cannot generate income their commitment to long-term preservation will not be there. That is true of publishing across the whole field, and it is part of the dialogue that we are having with the audio industry at the moment. That industry has been pleased to recognise the British Library as the de facto national archive for the whole of the industry. As far as newspapers are concerned, it is a very financially challenged industry at the moment, not least through the challenge of the internet and the collapse of advertising revenue in particular. Whilst they are very sympathetic to the need for a newspaper heritage, again they are not willing to commit money unless they can see there is a viable business plan to underpin it. Some of the big nationals, for example The Time, have been able to digitise pretty well the whole of their archives because there is deemed to be a commercial market out there, but the vast majority of the UK newspaper we hold are local and regional. We talk not simply to the industry organisations like the Newspaper Publishers Association and the Newspaper Society but to some of the individual trade publishers. They are not really in a position to get the investment they need from the industry. One has only to look at the situation in London at the moment where recently two free evening newspapers have been launched. This is well documented in learned articles in papers like the Economist and so on. The industry feels too challenged financially to enable it to invest. Further, our national newspaper collection is not confined to the UK; it is the Commonwealth's newspaper collection and, in some senses, the world's newspaper collection. The UK newspaper industry quite rightly feels that it should not be put in the position of having to preserve this for everybody. I have been working very closely with the industry over a good number of years. Whilst there is enormous sympathy for it and we have had tremendous press coverage recently from people like Donald Chalford, Linda Christensen and so on, there is no prospect of a significant financial investment coming from the newspaper industry.

Q82 Mr Sanders: I am concerned about duplication of effort. If one has The Times archiving everything surely rather than your having to do the same job can one not swap data?

Dr Field: One of the things we are talking about - because now newspapers are essentially produced digitally - is trying to separate what is in print, which we hope over time to convert to digital, from what is now being produced digitally, so even the print newspapers are essentially produced as digital PDF feeds. Unfortunately, to return to our position in terms of legal deposit there is no statutory legal deposit in this country three years after the passage of that Act for anything other than print. We would certainly be willing to enter into a dialogue where we began to get new newspaper material in digital form. It is not necessarily the case that the industry will give a long-term commitment to that. Again, the commercial exploitation of online newspaper content is delivered largely through licensing arrangements with the Newspaper Licensing Agency. Its commitment essentially is that whilst there is business sense in doing that historically the newspaper industry's archiving has largely been around news clipping services. Most of those - we were recently approached by the Daily Mail - have given up on that. Essentially, their archive is their online archive for the past few years. Beyond that, newspapers themselves are increasingly dependent on the services which the British Library provides.

Q83 Mr Sanders: You always need a hard printed copy, do you not, because the danger with a digital file is that it can be hacked and altered? Legally, you need the hard copy should there be a dispute?

Dr Field: Yes, but our strategy is that if we take in hard copy and literally preserve it as an artefact - we wrap it up in acid-free paper and store it in our repository - we will need recourse to it only as a last resort. Current access within the reading rooms could be delivered for digital content where the digital content was an exact replica. But the problem is that we have had many dialogues with the Newspaper Licensing Agency. Our particular challenge is not so much around the nationals but the hundreds and hundreds of regionals and locals. At the moment the NLA does not have the rights to that material. Again, in relation to the UK material essentially what we desperately need to do is accelerate implementation of the legal deposit legislation which has now been on the statute book for three years.

Q84 Alan Keen: I understand that Colindale is nearly full. What will you do after Colindale? Presumably, you must be doing it now.

Ms Brindley: We have quite a complex strategy to deal with this. For the long term the board is very keen to vacate that building. We have an associated building there which is under a lease which will run out in about 2010. It is also a building that is not fit for purpose in terms of storage quality, nor in terms of the sort of services expected. There is a very strong wish on the part of people who use the St Pancras building and the reading rooms there to have a more integrated approach to access. As part of our SR submission one of our priorities is to ensure that we continue our programme of building storage. Most of that is being done. We have a 46‑acre site in Yorkshire. It is rather cheaper to build storage in Yorkshire than central London. That is the strategy that we would like to follow to ensure that we can keep the newspapers in appropriate conditions there. As to access, we are investigating surrogates and working to get money to digitise increasingly and provide service from that.

Q85 Alan Keen: I think that you were all quite pleased with this Committee's previous report. What came of it? Did you benefit from any of the recommendations? Did DCMS take notice and help you more, or was it academic?

Ms Brindley: One of the major recommendations was the one to us relating to digitisation. I think it was recommended that we should become the library for the many, not just the few. I think that that spurred us on to enormous effort to open up the British Library to everyone who can benefit from using it. In that sense we have been encouraged by the Committee and taken action in that way, and DCMS has supported that strategy.

Alan Keen: I think you can tell from this meeting that we care about it. Obviously, if there is anything else that you want us to put in the report that has not come up we are happy to receive further submissions.

Q86 Mr Evans: I visited the British Library a few months ago. I thought it staggering. It seemed to be a library for the many, not the few, because it was absolutely packed in all aspects, including the new business section which is very successful. Looking at the newspaper side of it and listening to your aspirations, just to keep a copy of all the regional newspapers, never mind the national ones, is a problem. Any of us who has ever bought papers and kept them at home for a few weeks knows how quickly they amass. What you are trying to do is hugely ambitious. Within your financial restraints, do you think you are able to achieve what you have set as targets?

Ms Brindley: You would hardly expect me to say yes to that question.

Q87 Mr Evans: What more do you need?

Ms Brindley: We are rightly ambitious. We have about 50 million page accesses to our website as well, so it is not just a packed building. Our biggest concern at this point - I know that it is a concern shared by many bodies - is the potential negative outcomes from the CSR spending review. We are deeply concerned.

Q88 Mr Evans: Are you already getting bad vibes from that?

Ms Brindley: We have been asked by the department and, obviously, the Treasury to model two scenarios: one is a 5% per annum cut and the other is 7%, and that is cumulative, so effectively the worst case is 21% over the period. This is deeply difficult for an institution which is hugely successful now by every measure. We have taken out £40 million in efficiency gains; we have lost 20% staff and we are delivering more and more. We cannot just do more by efficiency gains. In terms of SR the impact would be devastating. We are probably in the top two or three in the world. For example, if we had to cut our acquisitions to that level the impact would be that we would have at least 50% less spending power over the period. We would move from the top to the middle of the second division. Once we stop buying we cannot buy again. This is material which just comes in via the pipeline to which you rightly referred; it is 11 kilometres a year. Once lost we would never get it again. That is just one example of potential cuts, and it is a deep worry to us at this point.

Q89 Mr Evans: As far as concerns the public, if you had to make those cuts how would it impact the public either by access via the Internet or turning up at the British Library?

Ms Brindley: Part of meeting such a horrendous scenario would mean a very careful look at our opening hours. Clearly, we would have to close extra days a week, and we have already modelled that. We are already helping ourselves in terms of revenue of £25 million. No other national library in the world does that. We are doing a lot to help ourselves, and we will continue to do that. I think that the board would try to protect the core, and what would be at greatest risk would be some of these exciting public programmes, exhibitions and the ways that we have opened up. Those would be the short-term benefits. From the board's point of view, it would have to take the long-term view to protect its collecting and the stewardship of its collections.

Q90 Mr Evans: Turning the British Library into a pound stretcher will hardly enhance its reputation among the general public, particularly with its aspirations in regard to new media. You talked about sound recordings and how difficult that was already. Are you having difficulties in being able to access other information that you want to preserve? This has already been touched on in relation to web pages. Where do your aspirations finally rest? Do you basically want to collect virtually everything that you believe will be important to future generations? Where does it end?

Dr Field: I think that question needs to be divided into our responsibilities in terms of the publishing output of the UK in all its many manifestations. Obviously, we have statutory responsibilities here. Government thought it very important that those responsibilities should be extended to the digital arena and those need to be translated into the practical pieces of secondary legislation that will enable us to get on with that job. We also have a significant responsibility in terms of underpinning the UK research broadly defined, not just academic research, to develop what is called in our foundation Act a comprehensive collection, so we buy from all over the world. That is one of the distinguishing attributes of the library here from which the UK benefits enormously. In practice in the UK we have quite a centralised model of provision. Money which we spend through the British Library in developing that national collection, which is available on site and remotely, ensures that other bodies and agencies in the UK do not invest to such a great extent. There is an enormous advantage for higher education here. One of the points we would want to make is how strongly we support the agendas of other departments like DfES and, on the research side, the DTI/OSI. All of the work that has been done by bodies other than ourselves, like Sir Brian Follett's work on the Research Support Libraries Group, has clearly demonstrated the national cost benefits of investing through a centralised provision with a distributive model such as we have, as opposed to setting up lots of duplicate provision all over the UK.

Ms Brindley: In this sense we also underpin the public libraries sector in terms of interlending and document supply. Where local collections do not meet needs we supply services through public libraries to the public.

Q91 Mr Evans: Would all of this be under threat if you did not get the funding or you had to make the cuts that you have been asked to make?

Ms Brindley: Yes.

Q92 Mr Evans: You will not be able to make the efficiencies just by opening later and closing earlier. Something will have to give?

Ms Brindley: We have modelled this with DCMS. The department is deeply understanding of our point and very supportive in making the arguments on our behalf. It would be across the piece. Therefore, there would be a 50% acquisition impact, partly because we have an inflation factor of 6.6% on our acquisitions. It is well above the normally accepted inflation factor. We would have to close down our services significantly in terms of opening hours. The other thing that we are looking for is investment in the digital infrastructure that we talked about earlier. We would have to put that on hold. These are very real threats to the future of a great institution.

Dr Field: We would come back essentially to the philosophy and practice of our approach as outlined in the second section of our document in particular. This is a well thought out and balanced long term stewardship of all these elements and one cannot pick and choose. The whole thing begins to collapse like a pack of cards if one tries to take out elements of it.

Chairman: Thank you very much indeed.

Memoranda submitted by the Institute of Conservation

and the National Council on Archives

 

Examination of Witnesses

 

Witnesses: Mr Alastair McCapra, Chief Executive, Institute of Conservation, Mr Jonathan Pepler, Chairman, Ms Ruth Savage, Policy and Development Officer, National Council on Archives, Mr Nick Kingsley, Head of National Advisory Service, The National Archives, gave evidence.

 

Chairman: I welcome Alastair McCapra, chief executive of the Institute of Conservation, and Jonathan Pepler and Ruth Savage from the National Council on Archives.

Q93 Mr Sanders: How can the profile and funding of local authority archives best be improved?

Mr Pepler: There are a number of issues about local authority archives which affect their profile. The first point to make is the very narrow statutory basis on which it has built up, which is primarily a section of the Local Government Act 1972 that requires principal authorities to make proper arrangements for the archives and records in their care. That is quite a narrow base on which to build a network of services which provides the backbone of archive services across the country. The other issue which comes to the fore quite often is that no element of archive services is considered in the comprehensive performance assessment, or whatever process comes after that. Inevitably, I think that when local authorities are under pressure financially they will focus on those services and aspects of them which feature largely in the CPA and related matters. Those are the two principal issues on which I would focus. I think that local authority archives are working hard with MLA and TNA in partnership to develop the profile of their services. They are major participants in the Archives Awareness campaign which is now in its fourth year. If Members of the Committee are not familiar with it, that campaign was designed to focus on raising the profile of archives with a network of events across the country. This year some 500 events across the country are arranged under the Archives Awareness campaign. There is local media coverage. That is a very useful way to focus the efforts being made and give them a national framework.

Q94 Mr Sanders: If it is not part of the CPA is anybody out there studying the difference in performance between different local authorities to judge whether some are good, less good or very poor?

Mr Pepler: For about 16, 17 or 18 years crude financial data have been collected by the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy.

Q95 Mr Sanders: That tells you only what has been spent, not how the authorities have been performing?

Mr Pepler: Other surveys have been made. The Public Services Quality Group has been carrying out regular surveys of users to get their responses to the services they have been given. Those have revealed some very useful data over the past four or five years. The last one was published only very recently. In terms of user satisfaction, the levels are enormously high - well into the nineties. The limitation of the PSQG survey is that it focuses on those people who come through the door, and this morning the point has been made that an awful lot of people never darken our doorstep at all. I think that there are moves in hand to try to monitor and get feedback from remote users about their perception of the quality of the service they are getting, so the survey is extended to that extent. The last point I make is the one made by Mr Kingsley in his presentation in relation to the self-assessment survey just completed. We hope that that will be a very useful tool for getting a feel for how services are performing. There are a lot of variations in the size and scale of services offered across the country. Some are very small. About 18 borough and unitary authority archive services have a staff of three or fewer, so there is considerable variety. There is no uniform standard of provision across the country.

Q96 Mr Sanders: Should it be standardised across the country or should it be left locally? After all, it is local government, so let local areas decide.

Mr Pepler: I believe that there is scope for some standardisation. That is the sort of outcome which is expected from the self-assessment exercises. The point made earlier is that these are not stand alone services; they are part of a national network of archive services, making provision across the country, and readers will go to wherever the sources are that they want; they will not necessarily use their local office. There is an expectation that they will find roughly the same resources and facilities wherever they go. There is a case for some agreed standards.

Q97 Mr Sanders: Turning to conservation and care of collections, the Institute of Conservation identified many of the problems facing those responsible for the care of collections. Which do you consider to be the most serious, and how do you think they should be addressed?

Mr McCapra: You will not be surprised if I begin by mentioning money. Money is a problem largely because of the performance drivers to which most museums, galleries, libraries and archives find themselves answering. It is difficult to make the case for the necessary funding for conservation, although I think there are some examples which show that a significant difference can be made with relatively small sums of money. In the appendix to our evidence we mention the experience of Birmingham museums and galleries which have taken a lead in training some small local museums to make sure they better understand their conservation and preservation needs and are better trained to cope with them. That programme is costing about £40,000 a year across the whole of the West Midlands. You can see that for about half a million pounds a year that can be extended nationally across England. If one did that perhaps for four or five years one would have a whole generation of people across small museums who would be capable of understanding their needs and responding to them. One might then need to pick that up every five to seven years in future as staff turned over. Certainly money is a problem. A second problem is to do with political attention. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport has just produced a document called Understanding the Future Priorities for England's Museums. I have read it twice relatively quickly. I do not believe that it mentions the care of collections; and I do not believe that the word "stewardship" appears in it. Once again, from the top we have a statement of priorities in which conservation and preservation figure very small, so it just makes it hard for people from the bottom up to articulate a case. A third point would be to do with training and staff development. That matter is addressed in one of the later chapters. There are problems to do with specialist skills, particularly in the move towards outsourcing conservation work largely to sole practitioners who do not have the capacity to train people up. That is fine for the moment because most people who are now sole practitioners were trained through museums. They might have worked for the British Museum, British Library or a guildhall somewhere for 10, 15 or 20 years and they have those skills, but they are not then able to pass those skills on to the next generation. Therefore, money, political priority and the skills base are the three matters to which we would draw particular attention.

Mr Pepler: If I may just pick up the question of outsourcing of conservation, certainly in the archival sector conservation is much more than mending what is damaged. In-house conservation resources can do so much more in the way of monitoring storage conditions, ensuring good packaging and so on and preventing future damage from taking place or being aggravated.

Q98 Alan Keen: We have had lots of submissions to the effect that your sector really is not being looked after sufficiently well by DCMS. Have you had a chance to put thoughts together as to what changes you would like to be made? Why does not DCMS understand the needs of your sector?

Mr Pepler: I am not sure I can answer the "why" question. Certainly, the archive sector is conscious that archives do not feature very highly on DCMS's agenda. Certainly, the home page on its website lists the things for which it is responsible and it does not mention archives anywhere. I do not think that from the point of view of the national council it has a strong view on responsibilities. The archive sector is of its nature a rather hybrid beast. At one end it is dealing with current information management and at the other end its role is very much to do with cultural heritage and it does not necessarily fit well within any particular departmental brief. What we would like to see is much greater co‑ordination between the numerous departments with a finger in the archival pie: the DCA, DCLG, DfES and even the DTI in part in relation to business archives. What we would like to see is better co‑ordination of what is being done. Just going back to DCMS, the archival sector was delighted when MCA was established. It was the first time the archive sector had any general recognition as a whole at departmental government agency level. We would wholly applaud DCMS for that.

Mr McCapra: I believe that DCMS has quite rightly focused on making big changes in the way the cultural heritage sector generally thinks about and engages with the public, and that is good. We are not against that at all. Having referred to this DCMS document, there is almost nothing in it with which we would disagree, but the emphasis on making changes in access and public engagement over the past seven or eight years has taken the focus away from longer term sustainability. It simply is not possible to keep, as the Treasury requires DCMS to do, driving more and more people through cultural heritage institutions and driving usage up year on year without also doing some of the work that underpins that for the future.

Q99 Alan Keen: To be fair to the department, if we look at other areas of policy we find that in sport, for instance, there is more money for healthy living. DCMS has little money itself. It happens right across the areas that DCMS tries to cover. I hope that we can do the job for you by reporting the criticism that you have made. It is not so much a matter of what it has done wrong; it just does not recognise it sufficiently.

Ms Savage: I certainly agree with that. The National Council on Archives is jointly funded by The National Archives and Museums, Libraries and Archives Council. Therefore, my contact with DCMS is necessarily limited. It has been more than welcoming but misinformed. I believe that that is indicative of the division of labour between DCMS and MLA regarding who is responsible for what. My feeling is that they do not want to tread on each other's toes and, therefore, nobody takes a particularly strong lead specifically on archives. For instance, the archives task force was a very well researched and consulted upon piece of work and it came out with some concrete proposals, but the work has not been funded. Although various players within the sector have taken on some of those pieces of work of their own accord, obviously central co‑ordination has been lacking and its impact has not been what we desired.

Q100 Chairman: Do you think it would help if there was one government department with overall responsibility for all aspects of archives? If so, should it be the DCMS?

Mr Pepler: From a position of relative ignorance, I would not have thought that would be a particularly helpful approach. Probably the more important thing is co‑ordination between departments. To try to encompass the whole of the archival sector within one would be unrealistic and lead to further strains, tensions and stresses in other bits of the structure.

Q101 Mr Hall: To look at the other side of the coin, you focused on what are perceived as the failings of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to recognise the value of archives and the work that is going on. What about the sector itself? Surely, the sector should take some responsibility for taking a lead on this issue?

Ms Savage: The sector has taken a certain amount of lead within its small amount of resources. Obviously, you are talking about a number of people who see as their primary loyalty the continued existence of the collections within their care. If you are asking me why we do not have a larger body of evidence to present to you on what has and what has not happened it is because given the choice of spending the extra £250 on preserving this or that collection or investing in a small amount of research on the user base they would choose the conservation of their collections.

Q102 Mr Hall: But one of the gaps in the evidence that you have put before the Committee is the lack of a real advocate or prominent champion. Who is to develop that role as a prominent champion?

Mr Pepler: This is a conundrum that we have been facing for some time. Obviously, TNA plays a leading role in setting the agenda for the archive sector, as does MLA. We could do with a third champion. This sector is very fragmented and, in many cases, involves very small players. It is split across charities, higher education, local authorities and businesses and it is very difficult to find a single united candidate for this championship role, but there is recognition of that lack and the sector is trying to address it.

Q103 Mr Hall: Why cannot the National Council on Archives do this job?

Ms Savage: The answer is that we would love to be able to do so. However, I am one of only two paid officers in the national council who can dedicate their time to this. My colleague who works with me is engaged full time on advising archives that apply to the Heritage Lottery Fund for funding to assist them in getting the money that they cannot get from other places. That leaves me. I do my best but I am only one. I have tried to balance the needs of the depositors, the users and the professionals themselves in the way the council has been set up to do. We try to balance those interests, for example as far as concerns support for the Archive Awareness campaign. We work with the BBC to try to gather in more money for events tied to "Who Do You Think You Are?" and so forth to broaden awareness among the general populace that these are their collections and they are entitled to go in and look at them in a way that family historians have grasped with both hands. It is incredibly welcome that they are taking out that knowledge to all sorts of people and telling them that these things are there for them and they can be used not only for family history. There are other difficulties. In an ideal world we would say The National Archives will be our great champion. TNA has taken the responsibility within the national advisory services to give voice to the concerns of the wider sector. Their primary purpose, however, is the preservation of government archives. The DCMS similarly would want to consider the cultural and heritage impact of archives, but the spectrum runs right from information management of present records, which may well come under DTI that might have more expertise in that area, right the way along the spectrum.

Mr Pepler: I think the answer comes back to the resourcing of the MCA. If the MCA is to play a full championing role it will need much more infrastructure, lobbying resources and a full-time advocate, etc, to do that role effectively.

Q104 Mr Hall: Basically, there is a plea for more funding in terms of allowing an organisation to be the advocate on behalf of archives or to have a co‑ordinator in order to bring the sector together so it can speak with one voice to government?

Mr Pepler: I think that the gathering together within a united voice is a matter within the NCA's present capacity. It is the presentation, lobbying and positive day-in-day-out advocacy that is missing at the moment.

Q105 Mr Hall: I want to take you back to one matter that you mentioned earlier: the archive task force and the concept of "Written in the past, speaking to the Future" and the wonderful idea of a gateway to all the archive material. Do you want to say a little more about that?

Ms Savage: I think that is a matter to which The National Archives as the lead body that came out of the UK body, which was a coalition of providers, would be able to give a much better answer. Would it be within protocol for me to pass that question to Mr Kingsley for him to answer it? He would give a much better response.

Q106 Chairman: I am sure we can allow it.

Mr Kingsley: The National Council on Archives produced the original report in 1998 which recommended the creation of a national archives network. That vision has been partly pursued by a series of projects that has operated over the past 10 years. One of them is called Gateway Access to Archives which has been run by The National Archives and largely funded by that body and the Heritage Lottery Fund. The archives task force report really envisaged the creation of the archives gateway as a souped-up version of The National Archives network to which a considerable range of additional things were added that would give substantially greater public benefit than just the online access to archival catalogues envisaged by the original report. What has happened in the past few years is that since the task force reported the lack of new money to support that vision has made it very difficult to find a way for the profession to take forward the concept. A proposal was made to the Heritage Lottery Fund for substantial support to enable us to build the major plank of the archives gateway. That bid was unsuccessful. The grounds on which it was rejected made it fairly clear that the Heritage Lottery Fund would not be the major source of funding for a project in this area. We have really struggled so far to find alternative ways to take it forward. We are currently considering how the essential elements of a national archives network can be delivered with a range of other primarily academic funding sources contributing to it, but I have to say that it is not at all certain that that will work either. We are casting round for a way in which this important element of the vision can be addressed. The funding outlook for the next few years in central government does not give one much encouragement to think that this is something which is about to be magically sorted out.

Q107 Helen Southworth: I want to ask you about the magic of local archives. We have benefited from some very good presentations from the British Library and The National Archives, but the odds are that the places where my constituents can gain access to information are locally. I am not talking necessarily about Warrington but when people visit other places. I remember that when I was at school I benefited phenomenally from the fact that over 100 years local administrators had every year bought a painting at the exhibition. That meant I could access paintings from books and catalogues from art galleries all over the world or I could go to my local art gallery and see Turners. That is the same for archives, is it not? You can go in and find out about your local community and the stars over the past 1,000 years. You may not be able to see Magna Carta but you may have a lot more interest in the charter for your town.

Ms Savage: In most local archives you can see things that are older than those available in the national collections.

Q108 Helen Southworth: For many, archives are not just information that can be accessed through the Internet; they mean indentations on the paper, the colour of the ink, the weave of the paper, the smell of it and so on.

Mr Pepler: I think that promoting the magic of it is part of the trick, and it is something which historically local archive services have not been particularly good at. In many cases one comes back to the issue of buildings. Many of the buildings which are now occupied were designed simply as large blocks of storage with a room at the front where people could come and look at documents they had asked for. There are no facilities for interpretation, presentation and exhibition which ideally one would like to have. Equally, one needs to get out into the community and put on exhibitions in that way. The magic is something that people experience once they have seen it; it is like an infectious disease. Once they have seen it it tends to work, but the presentation and reaching out to them is a very tricky thing.

Ms Savage: This leads to the telling of stories to illustrate the magic. To give just one example, a person who had lived at the back of my house was in an old people's home. She had been a concert violinist. As a result of Alzheimer's disease she had lost that ability. Someone from the local history society had gone round recording local memories and learned of her story. She went back and found a recording of her playing. She went back to the old people's home to play it to her. She cried and then took out her violin and played again.

Q109 Helen Southworth: Archives are about who we are and how we relate to one another, are they not? Accessing archives gives local communities the opportunity to learn things about themselves and each other, so what is the message to government?

Mr McCapra: We need to get over our embarrassment about talking in these terms. There was a period beginning in the 1980s when cultural heritage institutions were compelled to talk about what they did in economic terms and they were allowed to talk about how they helped tourism and, a bit later on, how they promoted regeneration. If you look at a lot of the language that comes out of MLA or DCMS at the moment, it is all about social cohesion, mental health or other things which almost make it appear that cultural institutions are an arm of social services. Nobody disputes that they have these qualities, but what we have become embarrassed talking about is the intangible intrinsic things and what you call "magic". Interestingly, the public still talks about things in that way. A couple of years ago DEMOS did a survey in which people were asked what they thought about cultural heritage and why they valued it. They talked in exactly the same terms that everybody has been using in the past few minutes. We on the supply side, if you like, have got out of the habit of talking that kind of language. If we want to re‑engage the public and make them believe there is a lot of potential in local archives and it is an interesting place to go to we need to rediscover that language and talk to people in terms which they already use themselves and readily understand.

Q110 Helen Southworth: I want to ask about the relationship between local archives, local museums and the nationals in terms of my constituents in Warrington being able to access at a local museum examples of excellence which can be held only by the nationals or by another local archive because it is out on loan. How is that working? Is it functioning? Are we getting that kind of access to the national stuff in the regions? Is that relationship working?

Mr Pepler: In terms of the resources which The National Archives is putting on line, you have all the censuses and that sort of thing available locally in whatever place you happen to be. Is that the point about which you are inquiring?

Q111 Helen Southworth: I am referring both to online access and the ability to go somewhere. My school children cannot come to London and look at something in the way they can go into the local town centre, or into Liverpool or Manchester. Therefore, in Warrington for the majority of the people learning the magic is dependent on something happening within the geographical area to which they have access.

Mr Pepler: Are you talking mainly about museum collections or archive collections?

Q112 Helen Southworth: Archives. From your perspective is there now an interrelationship and is it working satisfactorily, or is it under threat?

Mr Pepler: Between museums and archives locally or between national institutions and regional ones?

Q113 Helen Southworth: I am referring to national institutions and regional and local areas.

Mr Pepler: There are certainly no schemes for loans of materials, if that is what you have in mind.

Q114 Helen Southworth: Yes.

Mr Pepler: I think we would rely on digital access to these things.

Q115 Helen Southworth: Is that because of the nature of the material?

Mr Pepler: It is not good principle to shuffle documentary artefacts hither and yon. I think my colleagues would confirm that most damage to archives occurs in the handling process, as a statement of the obvious. The more you handle and transport these things the greater the risk. Given the quality of digital reproduction nowadays, one can almost get the feel of the parchment, if you like, through the digital surrogate.

Q116 Helen Southworth: I did not understand. I thought you were talking about digital access by computer, but you mean reproductions of equal quality in many ways?

Mr Pepler: Yes. Without question a lot more can be done. Certainly, various local authority archive services are working with children's services to develop materials which can be used directly in schools and put together learning packs that include reproductions of documents. They can be used not just in an historical context but in literacy, numeracy, citizenship and all those other areas of learning. A lot of work is going on to develop that sort of material, but again in many cases it is a resource issue. The will is there to do it, but the resource to capture that pack and trial it in schools and with teachers to see whether that is what they need and then refine it takes resources which are not always available. Some very successful projects have been carried out at local and regional level to provide that resource. The Learning Links project in the North West has done some very good work with schools in developing that kind of material.

Ms Savage: The Learning Curve provided by The National Archives also talks to teachers and the curriculum authorities about what would fit in with what they need, but again it is not the same as going to see, feel and smell it.

Q117 Helen Southworth: I ask finally about purchasing. The British Library made very clear representations about purchasing. What is the picture for local archives? Is there a purchasing fund? If not, does there need to be one? What are the issues and concerns locally about the Comprehensive Spending Review?

Mr Pepler: There is no central dedicated fund for local authority archive purchases. Individual authorities make provision. I think that the last figure I saw indicated that the total across all local authority archives was something like £400,000. I believe that that was distorted by one particular case involving £170,000. Generally, one is talking about a quarter of a million pounds across the whole of England, Wales and Scotland. This morning somebody gave me a cutting about a family collection that has been in the Warwickshire Record Office for many years. It is now being asked for £150,000 to buy it back. Purchases are becoming an increasing problem.

Ms Savage: That particular case is indicative of the common problems faced by local record offices, in that often it is material that has been deposited with them and has been cared for by those offices for many years on loan, but because of increased interest in these collections and people's greater awareness of the value of them it comes down to a simple matter of economics. The monetary value of these things goes up and the depositors are hit with a big inheritance tax bill. What do you do? Do you give up your ancient pile or sell that pile of papers that your great-grandfather deposited at the local record office, or ask that office to pay for them? Because of the way that system has grown up historically the vast majority of local record offices have marvellous collections that enable local people and the public at large to see them, but, unlike the way that The National Archives is able to digitise things and put them on the web, quite often the terms of the deposit can mean that local record offices are not able to do that with these particular collections.

Mr Pepler: From the local authority budgeting point of view, one of the problems is that these demands are largely unpredictable. One cannot say that year on year one needs to provide x thousand pounds for purchases because one can suddenly receive a demand for figures of up to £2 million which are charged for individual collections. That is an enormous amount. There are external sources of funding and in that regard the Heritage Lottery Fund springs to mind, but there is a considerable amount of resource required to make the bid and prepare and present it in the right way. There is again a capacity issue in this case. It is a long-term threat to many archive collections.

Q118 Helen Southworth: We have been told that there are issues around collecting archives from creative people who are still alive. Is there a perspective here to do with locality? I am a North West-type of person and I believe that if something goes to my local area that is okay; if it goes outside I can understand why people think that it does not matter too much as long as it is kept within the country. If it is to have global internet access you will not necessarily regard it as being a big issue. Lots of people have a sense of local roots. Is there a relationship between local archives and local writers, poets and musicians in terms of getting them to provide their archives, and how can that be developed?

Ms Savage: That touches on the skills of the curator, conservator and interpreter of the archive as well as various other issues to which you have referred. Yes, a collection from a local person, whether he be a creative individual, local politician or whatever, within a local setting where people have an understanding of the local context can bring that completely alive and give interpretations that are inaccessible to other people. An example given to me this morning was that the job of deciphering the handwriting of census-takers can be extremely difficult. However, if one has somebody from the local family history society on one's side helping he or she may point out local names and say where they come from, and flesh can then be put on the bones and the matter can be put in context, thus bringing it alive. From that one gets not only the emotional context but the academic and research context.

Chairman: We have to call a halt; otherwise, we will not have time for our next session. I thank you very much for your evidence.

Memoranda submitted by the British Film Institute,

the Film Archive Forum and the Bridgeman Art Library

 

Examination of Witnesses

 

Witnesses: Ms Amanda Nevill, director, Ms Heather Stewart, cultural programme director, British Film Institute, Dr Frank Gray, director of Screen Archive SE, Dr Luke McKernan, chairman, Film Archive Forum, Viscountess Harriet Bridgeman, director, and Ms Pandora Mather-Lees, deputy managing director, Bridgeman Art Library, gave evidence.

Q119 Chairman: Thank you for your patience. For our final session this morning I welcome Amanda Nevill and Heather Stewart of the British Film Institute, Dr Frank Gray and Dr McKernan of the Film Archive Forum and Viscountess Bridgeman and Pandora Mather-Lees of the Bridgeman Art Library. I start by asking you to give us a quick overview of how you see the state of film archives in this country. Do you feel that the DCMS is giving them sufficient recognition and support?

Ms Nevill: I think the first thing to remember about film archives is that they are probably different from a lot of archives about which you have heard this morning. The film sector is still quite immature in lots of ways and film is a recent newcomer to the stage in the context of the heritage that we have been talking about this morning. Arguably, it suffers from that perception within the cultural sector. Film has very particular demands and frustrations as well as particular opportunities, as you know. I argue that at the moment film archives are definitely quite challenged. In this country we have the national film archives, which the BFI looks after, and the regional film archives. The national archive is the most significant archive of moving footage in the world, and it is one of the nation's great heritage treasures. To give an indication of size, we look after 27 acres of film archive. As you know, film archive is inherently unstable so one cannot just leave it for 10 years and then go back and dust it; one must be constantly vigilant and look to conserve it. It is an ongoing activity. Real opportunities are opening up and it is a tantalising sector to be in. On the one hand, we are being quite assiduously courted by a lot of commercial companies because content is king. On the other hand, our ability to present that material to the wider audience is completely dependent on our ability to look after it at its core. One matter that struck me this morning was the opening question by Mr Davies. He asked what could be done to change the perception of archives. I am not convinced that in many cases the best way is to champion the archive for archive's sake. We need to look at the picture holistically; in other words, by and large the archives are an engine for their outcomes. At the BFI we have had some wonderful successes in the past two years particularly with co‑productions. We have done some great co‑productions with the BBC, one of which was the Michelin Kenyan. This stunned the BBC. For that co-production on three consecutive Friday nights we had larger audience for archive material than for "Big Brother", but one must put it in context. If one had not rescued the material one would probably have spent many millions of pounds conserving and preserving it, repairing sprocket holes and doing wonderful digital things to it so that it would be consumable and usable by the BBC. The public would not otherwise have been able to access it. If one was asked what one would like to see affirmed by government, it would be that the link between the need to fund the core care and stewardship of the archives should be carefully balanced with the dynamic and equal and opposite importance of making those collections freely available. That is sometimes which is lost at the moment. It is sometimes convenient and easy to forget that when in the Midlands we have something like 240,000 admissions to films from the BFI without the investment that needs to be put into the archive itself it would not be possible to do that. In terms of regional film archives, Dr McKernan and Dr Gray will be able to talk eloquently to it. The other issue, which has been a constant refrain all morning, is that the film sector is very underfunded. I argue that it is in a parlous state. This is not anecdotal; a whole slew of reports over the past five years points to the difficulties in this area.

Q120 Chairman: Perhaps the Film Archive Forum would like to add something.

Dr McKernan: The Film Archive Forum, of which the BFI's national archive is a part, represents the public sector film archives in the UK. Essentially, we have three or four national archives and eight English regional archives. As Ms Nevill has indicated, the English archives represent a substantial proportion of the moving image heritage in this country. Films and television programmes that lay stress or focus upon particular communities and are very relevant to the people in Yorkshire, Midlands and so forth where films in the national collection might not necessarily have the same resonance are subsisting on absurd funding. For the last year for which we have records there has been £260,000 of core funding through the UK film councils through to the regional screen agencies for eight collections. They are subsisting on approximately £30,000 to £40,000. They are bringing in a lot more in terms of project funding and money from local authorities and earned income as well, but at the core there is no other body within the archives sector that subsists on such little funding.

Q121 Chairman: You are suggesting that you are struggling with the existing level of funding. We also know that there is a prospect that the present level may be under threat. If so, the outlook will be extremely bleak?

Dr McKernan: Indeed. We are faced with the possibility of losing an archive or two at any moment. They do subsist largely on project funding, so you may go to an archive that looks reasonably healthy and has six or seven people there and all but one are being funded by HLF or whatever and it staggers on for a period and hopes that it survives thereafter. We have not lost an archive yet during the existence of the forum.

Dr Gray: As you gather, we could speak for ever given the precarious nature of it. It is interesting to look at the reasons for it. As Ms Nevill said, there is significance in film being regarded as a newcomer to the archive community. If you look at the regional archives in England and other national archives in Wales in Scotland, this movement started in the mid-1970s and it has grown since then. It is interesting that each one has spawned a set of alliances, sometimes with local authorities, museums and record offices. What we share is an interest in local and regional history and the way that the moving image can connect with that history in an immediate way. The word "magic" was used earlier today. There is a lot of magic when you go to an archive film show because there is a sense of recognition of an immediate shared past, and it is special to be part of that. But to build these archives as institutions and support them will always be a patchwork affair because it has relied on alliances with local authorities, record offices and museums. A very significant role is played by higher education, but it is a patchwork. Sometimes that patchwork does not have a very good steer or leadership from the nation. This is beginning to change because we now have the Film Heritage Group. For the past two and a half years we are beginning to see a more positive direction, but for most of the history of the original film archives it has been difficult because it has been a matter of what is done in our own regions. Only now are we getting that kind of joined-up philosophy and thinking.

Q122 Chairman: I turn to the Bridgeman Art Library. You will have heard a lot of the preceding evidence this morning about digitisation, which is obviously something of which you have enormous experience. Can you tell us, first, your reaction to some of the things you have heard, and, second, what do you see as the priorities of government in this area?

Viscountess Bridgeman: You may be quite relieved to hear that we have never asked for funds from government but we have asked for more communication and co‑operation with government. We have been left 17 museums over the past 35 years. We have made a lot of the resources of their photographic departments viable because of the income that we produce for them. We have 2,000 collections and international collections outside the UK as well. We have a lot of expertise because we operate in other countries: we have offices in Paris, Berlin and New York. We talk to DCMS, MLA and all the relevant people about the fact that we have an extraordinary corpus of images from UK collections that we can put at their disposal for the required educational remit when working with the BBC and so on. Each department is asked what it thinks about it but they never actually come back to us. That is really my main bone of contention. We have created a very good commercial archive which can generate money. We rely a lot on interns. We run it very economically. About 15 ago when we were representing the British Library the photographic department said that we were making more money for them than they were able to make simply because we were a small organisation which could act quickly on our feet. We did not have to wait for various levels of management to decide what type of new software to acquire. This has been a tremendous advantage to us, but it has also given us a wealth of experience. We would very much have liked the Government to use this and perhaps to have consulted us on what the best way forward would be.

Ms Mather-Lees: To clarify a point raised earlier, the collections that we represent retain the intellectual property in their images when they leave them with us. Another point is that we span museums, galleries, archives, private collections and hidden treasures, so it is not just UK public museums; we span a wider collection of resources. One of the most important things for us is to look at the UK digital libraries initiative. What we would like to see are some standards being imbedded generally across the whole sector, private and commercial. I think it is important that if we are to move forward with the process of digitisation, first in a file image format and then with the meta-data attached to the file which has a huge value, we look at creating some agreed standards across the board. We have been doing this with our 2,000 collection sources for many years and we are always looking at new developments. I think we have established a pretty good basis so far.

Q123 Chairman: Are you satisfied that museums and institutions are doing enough to work with you to maximise the value of their assets rather than coming along to tell us that they need more money?

Ms Mather-Lees: I think that more museums could be working with us. The 2,000 collections that I cited are from around the world and they include individual photographers and 500 artists for whom we manage copyright as well as reproduction rights. We are very much self-funding. We have received a limited amount of European funding to research meta-data and file delivery, but we are very much self-funding. We do that by licensing commercial rights, so we have users who are in the film and television industries, publishing, advertising and design right across the board and around the world. What we do is very much driven by the users, which is important, but we would like to bring more collections on board. We think that we do a very good job for them, and it is good to have an homogenised database whereby one can search English artists' work and find a drawing in one part of the world and an oil on canvas in another part of the world. It does a valuable job in bringing those resources together.

Viscountess Bridgeman: Museums have been very co‑operatives. Some years ago I talked to one of the museum association sponsored meetings about how museums could commercialise their collections more. In the early days we spoke on the whole only to museum directors or curators because there was not a commercial department within museums. In the time we have been operating it has been very encouraging to see museums appointing commercial managers and the whole shift has become different. I remember a time when a museum director would not allow the images to be produced in colour because it was said the technology was not good enough; it could be produced only in black and white. Things have moved a long way, but there is still room for improvement.

Q124 Alan Keen: The Bridgeman Art Library wants more co‑operation from the public sector, and the British Film Institute in particular wants more co‑operation on copyright from the commercial companies that own those rights. Can you tell us a bit more about that problem?

Ms Nevill: In the national archive we do not own the right to probably two-thirds of the material that we hold. Obviously, the rights are vested in the studio or makers of the films. An interesting line that we have to walk down, because obviously the British Film Institute is part of the greater machinery that wants to ensure the film industry exists and thrives in Britain, is: what would be the best environment to allow educational use of the national archive and the material looked after by the public purse which does not at the same time hijack the potential income that the film-makers need and get from sales of their work? We have something called Screen Online which is in 12,000 schools in Britain. That is a fantastic resource. You can look at it at home on your own computer, except that you do not get the clips. It took about six people two years just to negotiate the rights to allow schools access to the clips, so it not just a database. There are lots of fabulous stories on it and there something like 300 hours' worth of clips contextually telling one about the history of British cinema. In a sense it is a bit of a nonsense that that cannot be made much more freely available outside libraries and schools through some sort of educational right, and possibly the model set up as part of the creative commons licence of which we were a leading partner - we were the first people to put material up there for that purpose - provides a way forward. But the industry and owners of the rights are very anxious about it, particularly in this country where the industry is quite fragile. A lot of its business comes from clips and nearly always they are the ones that people want to see and therefore have the greatest value within an educational resource.

Q125 Alan Keen: Is it possible to get a change in the copyright law to help in any way?

Ms Nevill: The answer is that there must be but I think that it is a matter of balancing the wider needs of the industry itself and the cultural and educational use. I do not think that we have yet discovered what might be the perfect balance, but the notion that that legislation should be revisited would definitely have huge advantages. It really gets in the way of our ability to get material out there on line.

Dr Gray: It may be a matter of having a better definition of "educational use". Education can be formal and informal. I am thinking also about the sites. There are museums that have an interest in showing moving images. One can think of record offices, libraries and access on line, but it is a matter of how to negotiate that more progressive understanding of educational use, which one would like to think would not compromise commercial use, and trying to make a clear distinction between the two.

Dr McKernan: Relatively few people come to the archives to see them; it is all about taking the archive out to people, be it online on screens, by television broadcasts or on tour.

Ms Nevill: We have a whole department that does nothing but negotiate rights constantly for us, whether we are showing it at the NFT, putting it on line, touring it or showing it internationally, or we are buying the rights. It is an interesting business.

Dr McKernan: It is also worth pointing out that not everything in the moving image industry has necessarily been produced by a commercial entity like a film or television company. A substantial amount of the films in the film archives are amateur, from home movies back to the 1920s and 1930s right up to what is being produced by the camcorder generation now. They are treated and preserved in the same way; they come under the same release agreements. When we are talking of the national film heritage and how we can take it back to the people, it is not purely what the industry has produced but what we have produced.

Ms Mather-Lees: On behalf of the image stills industry, there is a whole industry whose livelihood depends on licensing commercial rights. Sixty per cent of our business is in publishing and a significant proportion of that is in textbooks. One is now moving towards a digital arena where we are supplying packages on line. It is very important that we can still gain an income from that as an industry, including our company in particular. To let everything get out into the Internet and not get some sort of revenue from it would be quite damaging. You are right that it is a question of finding a balance.

Viscountess Bridgeman: There is a good deal of discussion under way at the moment. There are many blurred areas. I sit on the IP Advisory Committee of the Museum Documentation Association and we discuss issues such as fair use, which really has a different definition in America from that in England. We are discussing orphan works, which is very much a buzzword at the moment, and creative commons which has been an attempt to ease the problems with copyright. It is an exciting time because obviously technology has moved ahead of copyright. We are trying to work out what we should be doing, but a certain amount of action is going on there.

Q126 Mr Hall: One of the developments since 2000 is the creation of the regional film archives. It has not been a huge success. One of the eight regions has not been able to find a home and most of them are in financial difficulties. What is the solution to this problem?

Dr Gray: Certainly national co‑ordination is a very important step because it is something that we have lacked for far too long. Regional co‑ordination is also probably important. For far too long I believe that we have been stuck as a sector between the creative industries and the heritage sector and that has created unnecessary tensions. For example, the regional screen archives which are part of the devolved structure of the film council to the English regions see themselves very much as working with the creative industries and promoting film production and film training especially for young people. But this is a very different interest from, for example, nurturing leading film heritage organisations. A film heritage organisation in the public sector has a very specific interest in preservation, documentation, research and using the collection in as many ways as possible to benefit the public. We should start to address the infrastructure problems. From the standpoint of the English regions the lack of regionwide organisations has not helped us because we work closely with local authorities and so on. But a regionwide organisation, especially for the cultural sector, does not have regional government yet.

Q127 Mr Hall: We have regional development agencies, do we not?

Dr Gray: They have expressed very little interest in developing cultural organisations of this kind.

Dr McKernan: We have one example in Yorkshire which has supported the archive there.

Ms Nevill: There are some stunning examples like the Yorkshire film archive which has managed to put together a very persuasive plan to draw in funding from the regional development agencies. The key reason the film archives have been created is that, if you like, those archives are floating around and there is growing national awareness that we need to make certain that the material is saved. I suppose that the next question is: what is the best structure to ensure that the material is saved? This has brought about the advent of archives in every region. What the BFI is leading on at the moment is a co‑ordinated approach to the creation of a strategy for the future development of archives. We are asking ourselves some quite stiff questions. For example, does there need to be an archive store in every region? Would it be better and more beneficial to the public purse if there were examples of excellence on which we could focus? For example, it might be the BFI archive, or Yorkshire or East Anglia - areas which already have leading expertise in storage, care and preservation. But we would also advocate that there should be access in every region. One can distinguish between the two. What might the models be for that? One then has a strategy which says that one should do a proper audit of all the archives and work out what storage is needed for the future, what is the best place to locate that storage and where the expertise already exists.

Q128 Mr Hall: And also where there is public access?

Ms Nevill: It is commonality of access. What are the best mechanisms for access? Some would be put on line. That presupposes that if the BFI starts to look at the notion of a proper digital asset management system that will be infinitely scalable so that it can be used by all the regional archives. One could then provide access that way. I think that would be a more joined-up approach to it. We have done the first part of the strategy. That came out of an initiative by James Purnell when he was film Minister to do a project through the film council. The BFI led on the archive side and came up with the first part of the strategy and passed that to DCMS. We recognised at that stage that as we were fairly immature within the cultural sector we needed to get our act together, if you like. But we did recognise that there were little crises popping up around the country which put regional film archives in danger if there was not some limited stabilisation funding - I think it was under half a million - to allow a breathing space so that nothing vanished whilst we did the background work and established the best way forward. Nothing came of that. It went into DCMS and James Purnell, sadly, was moved on and his successor is just finding his way with his new portfolio. But we are having side discussions. We had a very interesting discussion yesterday with the Heritage Lottery Fund, looking at what might be the way forward and what would they be looking at to have a more joined-up approach to funding archives. A really startling factor emerged from that conversation. Heritage Lottery Fund would like to fund film archives to a greater extent but unless it is confident that the film archives are sustainable - in other words, that the core funding is there - it would be very difficult for them to look at it as a sector and be prepared to consider joined-up bids. It wanted to know what the bigger strategy was. But as an indication of how far behind the film archive strategy is in getting its act together, over the past 11 years HLF has made awards of £3.3 billion, of which only £23 million has gone to film archives and half of that has gone to the BFI. We then had a conversation about the obstacles that we needed to get over. One is the need to have a strategy; second, there needs to be confidence that the core issues are covered. For example, nobody wants to fund chillers for film. If you do not put film in a really cold place it deteriorates very fast. That is the most cost-effective way of looking after film. Third, within the sector there needs to be a huge development of skills so there is a capability both to pull together strategies and put in HLF funding but also to find a way to look after the film with all the basic archival core skills.

Q129 Mr Hall: The prognosis is not very good?

Ms Nevill: The prognosis at the moment is a bit spooky, to use a Yorkshire word. If we were talking about oil paintings to be saved we would say we must do something. What we have to do collectively is to say that film is the cultural art form of the 21^st and 22^nd centuries and also one that speaks more broadly to more people. It is easier to get into people's homes with film than with almost any other form of culture. I shall probably be stoned as I leave this room.

Q130 Mr Hall: Some of us have our own film archives in digital form and it goes back to the very early stuff at the beginning of the 20^th century?

Ms Nevill: Yes.

Ms Stewart: Even some recent material is in danger; it is not just a problem for older material. We have just restored some films from the late 1980s shown during the London film festival. It is not the case that the problem is confined to old material. You have heard a lot about digitisation. We are in the same boat as the earlier speakers. We are not able to digitise our content without permission from the copyright holders. We have an issue that goes beyond that, which is that unless you spend a lot of money on restorations it will not carry the same information as film. We have just shown a restoration of Great Expectations under the David Lean project. I can tell you that if you watched it in digital format it would just about be okay on your computer screen but you could not watch it on a screen that size. The material was in danger and so you had to spend money to make it look the way it was supposed to look, which is different from the archive at home.

Dr McKernan: The same is true of some digital material. An amount of material has been produced and lost because it never gets to the archive in the first place.

Chairman: I am afraid that the clock has beaten us. It is one o'clock and we must stop. Thank you very much indeed for coming along. Your evidence has been very helpful.