House of Commons - Culture, Media and Sport

Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport Sixth Report

3 The archives sector

What are archives?

165. Archives consist of a wide range of different media, covering every aspect of human life and society. Although the word "archives" has tended to conjure up images of parchment and paper rolls, archives also include public records of government departments and agencies and of local government, business records, maps, photographs, manuscripts, sound and audiovisual recordings and digital records (consisting of "born digital" materials such as websites, as well as digitised forms of physical materials). The National Council on Archives said that "archives are not libraries […] they contain original documents created by the normal day-to-day business of life in running government, a business or any other endeavour" and that as such they were "the immediate, unmediated raw materials of history, whereas when reading a published book, the author comes between you and the facts of a past event".[311] The word "archive" is, however, also used a slightly different sense when archives are set up to keep a record of the creative output of the past. Ms Lynne Brindley, the British Library's Chief Executive, made the point that archives are contained in libraries, so the distinction was blurred.[312]

Awakening interest in archives

166. The National Archives told us that archives were growing in popularity, probably faster than any other part of the sector.[313] One reason for the their growing popularity is that people have become more interested in their family history, and are investigating their forebears through censuses, printed material and through original documents held in county archives offices.[314] This was reflected in evidence from a number of family history societies, including the Federation of Family History Societies which represents more than 200 Family History Societies worldwide, including 150 societies in the British Isles with a combined membership of more than 250,000 family historians. Witnesses told us that that interest in archives was "at an all time high",[315] and that the phenomenal success of television programmes such as Who do you think you are? had contributed, bringing archives to a much broader audience than ever before. That programme was in its third series and had proved so popular that the BBC had moved it to a prime time slot on BBC 1.[316]

167. Also, the National Council on Archives has, since 2003, been co-ordinating the Archives Awareness Campaign, which aims to highlight the wealth of resources within the country's archive collections, and support archives in developing new audiences and raising their profile.[317] There has been a different theme for each year to encourage archives to stage events, exhibitions, events and promotional activities. Mr Nick Kingsley, Head of the National Advisory Service at the National Council on Archives (NCA), told us that, at local level, archive services had 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 such as programmes with a social inclusion and educational focus".[318] Research recently commissioned by the NCA has estimated that the number of community archives in the UK may reach into the thousands, demonstrating "the massive desire not just to be passive 'consumers' of archival heritage but a great appetite to be engaged in the preservation and celebration of archives. The research concluded that such activity encourages social cohesion, a sense of place, skill sharing and the raising of aspirations through local community endeavours".[319]

The composition and funding of the archive sector

168. Although numbers are hard to quantify, MLA estimates that there are 1964 archives in England which are of either national, regional or local importance.[320] A large proportion of the nation's archival heritage is held by some 300 archive services across the UK which actively collect material, of which about half are provided by local authorities and the remainder by national institutions, universities, royal colleges and other professional bodies and a small number of charitable trusts.[321]

169. The National Archives was created in 2003 by the merger of the Public Record Office and the Historical Manuscripts Commission. It is accountable to the Department of Constitutional Affairs, which provided core funding of £33 million in 2005-06. Its large archival collection spans 1000 years of British history, from the Domesday Book of 1086 to government papers recently released to the public. As well as being the UK government's official archive, the National Archives is the central advisory body on the care of records and archives in all media.

170. The British Library and a number of the DCMS sponsored museums are also grant-in-aid funded to maintain archives within their collections. Grant-in-aid funding for the British Library amounted to £97.5 million in 2005-06 and £102 million in 2006-07.[322] It has 150 million items in its holding. The British Library described one of its key roles as being "the memory to the nation", which it mainly discharged through its responsibility for the national published archive.[323] The Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003 entitles the Library to automatic free deposit by UK publishers of one copy of each of their print publications. Despite the digital revolution, the country's printed publishing output has increased by about 50% during the past decade. In 2005-06, the British Library acquired 545,000 items, including 103,000 monographs, 282,000 serial issues, 155,000 newspaper issues and 5,000 other items under legal deposit. Non-print materials are not subject to legal deposit, although the Act did create a framework for regulations to extend it to them (with the exception of sound and film). Accordingly, the Library told us, the integrity of the national published archive in such formats as sound and audiovisual recordings, microform, handheld electronic materials, and online publications, has depended upon a combination of Library purchasing and voluntary deposit. As these arrangements have proved only partially effective, significant gaps have opened up in the archive, not least in dynamic areas such as websites, most of which have already been lost to the nation.[324]

171. Local authority archive services form the backbone of the network of archival provision,[325] and, as DCMS put it, outside the National Archives they are "the key providers for protecting our written heritage".[326] Local authorities do have a statutory duty to make "proper arrangements with respect to any documents that belong to or are in the custody of the council of any of their officers" but there is no statutory requirement for them to operate an archives service as such.[327] In practice most do so, but we heard that "the level of provision varies widely from place to place".[328] The Association of Chief Archivists in Local Authorities (ACALG) told us that local authority archives housed the overwhelming majority of surviving private and business archives, simply because the offices had existed for a relatively long time and there is often no alternative home if the archives were to be preserved.[329] Most private archives held in public archive services remain the property of the original owner.[330]

172. Archive services run by local authorities are, like their museum counterparts, vulnerable at times of financial stringency in the competition for resources against services which are statutory.[331] ACALG told us that, in English county council services, gross expenditure on services per head varies from £2.726 to £0.383 as the result of the present arrangements "under which any authority can spend as much or as little as it chooses on archive provision".[332] The National Council on Archives told us that it was extremely worried that some local authorities had drastically reduced the budgets of record offices and county archives over recent years, putting both the collections and public access to them at risk: a number of record offices had had to reduce their opening hours as a result of annual budget cuts.[333]

173. Unlike museums, performance of archive services is not, as yet, included as a performance indicator for Comprehensive Performance Assessment, but the National Archives (TNA) is developing self assessment tools for both Records Management and Archive services. It believes that inclusion of these data in CPA assessments would raise the profile and importance of archives to local authorities, and therefore help support their development.[334] TNA told us that its pilot assessment data was being analysed, but initial indications confirmed the rigour of this approach as well as the existence of huge disparities in quality of service between authorities. This work has been welcomed by the sector.[335]

Project funding for archives

174. There were frequent references in both written and oral evidence to archives being the "Cinderella" or "poor relation" in the cultural sector.[336] Our attention was drawn to figures showing the breakdown of public expenditure between museums, libraries and archives in 2004-05, when museums received £619 million and libraries £913 million, archives received only £75 million, of which £36 million went to the National Archives.[337] More meaningfully, perhaps, it was suggested to us that archives with low levels of core funding would be unlikely to be able to secure the requisite "match funding" from their parent bodies,[338] and that most archives could not take advantage of the various project funds because they lacked the capacity and skills needed to secure project funding.[339] We were also told that there is a lack of non-core funding streams available to archives, other than the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF).[340] For example, although archives are now eligible for designated status under the Designation Scheme, they are not eligible from grants from the Designation Challenge Fund.[341] In the last twelve years, HLF has awarded £100 million to archives, which the National Council on Archives described as "much needed and very welcome", adding however, that it should be compared to the over £2 billion awarded to museums and built heritage over the same period.[342] HLF suggested that the sector presents distinctive challenges because, unlike other heritage institutions, where exposure to the "real thing" was fundamental to their importance, public access to archives could often be satisfied by access to surrogates, whether paper or digital copies.[343] HLF explained that archives would have a low priority for lottery funding because the archive services' first priority was the preservation of the original material and housing it to appropriate standards, and then its digitisation, cataloguing (and computerisation of existing catalogues).[344]

175. It seems to us anomalous that archives should be excluded from the Designation Challenge Fund. The Museums, Libraries and Archives Council should work with the sector to develop an equivalent of designation challenge funding for the most significant archive holdings. It should also work with the sector to find ways of helping archives services to make more effective approaches to the potential funders. A useful starting point may be to promote best practice among archives to demonstrate tangible public and community benefits (as well as curatorial and conservation benefits) which would accrue as a result of Heritage Lottery Fund investment.

176. We believe that increased visibility of the archive services provided by local authorities would strengthen their claims for adequate funding to enable them to provide high quality services and we recommend that the National Archives' self-assessment programme for local authorities should be included as a performance indicator under the Comprehensive Performance Assessment as soon as possible.

A champion for archives?

177. The archives sector is represented by a number of membership organisations. The National Council on Archives, which is funded by MLA and the National Archives, is its principal membership organisation. Its members include other membership organisations such as the Society of Archivists, the Association of Chief Archivists in Local Government, the Business Archives Council, the Film Archive Forum, the Federation of Family History Societies, the British Library, and The National Archives, all of whom submitted evidence to the inquiry.

178. The view of the National Council on Archives (NCA) was that the sector lacked a prominent champion to help raise its profile and represent the broad range of its interests with central government: as a consequence of split responsibility for the sector no one government department felt responsible for the archives sector in the UK.[345] Ms Ruth Savage, the Council's Policy and Development Officer, told us that the Council would like to fulfil that championship role but that having only two paid officers (one of whom was engaged full time on advising archives on Heritage Lottery Fund applications) there were not the resources to do so.[346] Mr Jonathan Pepler, the chairman, said that if the Council was to play a full and effective championing role it would need more infrastructure, lobbying resources and a full time advocate.[347] The Association of Chief Archivists in Local Government told us that there were worries over the sustainability of NCA's funding.[348] The Council receives funding on a year-by-year basis from the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, and the Association thought that it would enhance the ability of the National Council on Archives, and the sector, to act in a strategic fashion if it were funded in a longer-term way. [349]

Storage and stewardship

179. Although archives services do sometimes display parts of their collections, the principal use of them is by retrieval from stores, whether physical or digital, so that meaningful access to them depends on cataloguing, and storage in conditions which minimise deterioration and conservation. Particular challenges faced by the archive sector include a shortage of storage space and large backlogs of conservation and cataloguing. For example, the North West Regional Archives Council told us that with only a total 370 square metres of vacant archive accommodation available in record offices and a further 155 square metres in out-stores throughout the region, there was now insufficient capacity to ensure that major collections, particularly of an industrial or business origin, could be preserved or could be accommodated if they were at risk.[350] The National Archives told us that in the last 10 or 15 years there had been a number of new buildings, which had either been part-funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund or funded by committed local authorities, but archive services frequently ran out of space for storing new collections and had to turn important material away.[351] In a recent survey, the National Preservation Office (which is housed at the British Library and funded by a consortium of libraries archives and other stakeholders) found that only 50% of the material surveyed had physical storage which reached the required standards and only 34% was in an environment which reached the required standards of temperature and relative humidity, while 13% of material was actively deteriorating while in store, or could not be used without the risk of further damage.[352] Their unstable condition was largely because of damage sustained before the document entered the archives.[353]

180. The British Library told us that DCMS has funded an innovative and cost-effective high-density, high-bay and low-oxygen storage facility at the Library's Boston Spa campus, which will (when finished, in 2011) enable the Library to cope with collection growth to 2022-23 for all printed publications apart from newspapers, but that the national newspaper collection, housed at Colindale in North London, was under threat from its own fragility. Current storage conditions were not fit for purpose, in terms of temperature, humidity and other environmental controls, 15% of the collection is now inaccessible for research due to the deterioration of the newsprint and Colindale would be operationally full by the end of this year.[354] An options appraisal with a full recommendation for the way forward will be presented to the British Library's Board in September 2007: the Library hopes to offer an integrated newspaper service based on digital surrogates at St Pancras with hard copy stored to help preserve it for future generations.

181. Cataloguing is a core requirement of archive services as, without lists and indexes, the documents will be inaccessible. Several memoranda referred to the unglamorous nature of the task, which attracts little funding and in which there are enormous backlogs.[355] We were told that more new material is being taken in each year than is catalogued, one reason being that core staffing resources have been diverted to other priorities, such as expanding and widening the audience for archives through innovative access projects.[356] Mr Nick Kingsley, Head of National Advisory Services at the National Archives, told us that typically about a quarter of local authorities' archival holdings were uncatalogued which would represent "a number of years' work by tens of persons".[357] In the North West, a study has estimated that 29% of regional holdings were uncatalogued, a backlog which would require 224 years of archivists' time—on the assumption that no new records were received.[358]

Digitisation

182. The digital revolution has had an enormous impact on the archives sector in a number of mostly, but not universally, positive ways. Firstly, digital cataloguing makes for greatly improved access. Mr David Thomas, the Director of Collections at the National Archives (TNA) said that the really big change had been in catalogues. The National Archives' on-line catalogues could be searched very quickly from anywhere in the world whereas, before, searchers would have had to spend days trawling through the typewritten catalogues at Kew.[359] Dr Clive Field, the Director of Scholarship and Collections at the British Library agreed: the ready availability, across the world, of information about what was in the Library's collections had been a transformational change.[360] The cataloguing is, however, labour-intensive, and requires complex skills,[361] and archive services may have to deal with many accumulated years of printed or card catalogues. The British Library told us that the conversion of its catalogues from manual to digital formats was a major challenge and, although it had made a million more records available on the internet since 2000, much conversion still remained to be done.[362]

183. Secondly, the digital copying of physical records has the two-fold advantage of providing global access—of a quality where one can "almost get the feel of the parchment"—while the original can be stored away and protected from the wear and tear of handling.[363] Although digital copies require less storage space than physical materials, witnesses told us that it was still necessary to keep both, as there was a long way to go before digital copies could be regarded as full replacements for the originals.[364] Earlier assumptions about the permanence of digital records had proved to be over-confident. Ms Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive of the British Library, gave the example that the industry had said that CDs would last, but that meant "perhaps five to ten years".[365] Moreover, she said, digitised material needed to be refreshed as the formats and the software needed to read it also change, which was a continuing and dynamic problem.[366] The National Council on Archives described the situation as "precarious for paper preservation but "critical" for digital preservation.[367]

184. The Museums, Libraries and Archives Council said that archives were facing a revolution in the very nature of their collections, as archives of the future would be predominantly digital.[368] Many witnesses saw the archiving of "born-digital" materials as the most serious problem, partly because of the instability of the medium and partly because of the ephemeral nature of the materials. Mr David Thomas, Director of Collections at the National Archives, said that the biggest risk was the loss of digital records and information which were being created digitally with no active steps being taken to preserve them.[369] We heard that many websites, even some quite well known ones, have not survived from the 1990s, and another major cause of concern was that records now being created digitally by local authorities and other organisations could well be lost.[370] The National Archives told us that the transition to digital record keeping in government, business and other sectors had taken place very quickly, and most archives were not yet in a position to receive or preserve them. While the National Archives itself is close to a long term solution and is working with the British Library and others to establish effective techniques which others can adopt, many repositories had "barely begun the transition".[371] Baroness Ashton of Upholland said that this was one of the biggest challenges facing the National Archives.[372] Warwickshire County Council told us that its Record Office had "been able to make no headway whatsoever in preparing to accession digital archives" and warned of a serious potential gap in the record-keeping continuum at the point when paper records were superseded by electronic ones.[373]

Acquisitions

185. Traditional archives simply accumulate by addition of current records and deposit, and purchase has never been the major means by which public archive collections are built up. But like the rest of the sector archive collections are facing barriers to acquisitions. Although the sums involved in acquisition are not comparable to those in the fine art market, the proportional size of the funding gap may be, as the raised profile of archives has resulted in new markets (including overseas markets) and higher values. While they may rarely reach the eight-figure prices of old master paintings, the British Library told us that substantial and important archive collections are now often priced in the £500,000 to £1 million range, with fierce competition from institution and private collectors in the United States and, more occasionally other countries.[374] Several respondents told us that one consequence of this inflation in values was that owners of private archives, which may have been on loan to and looked after in local authority archives services for many years, were seeking to realise what had become valuable assets.[375] We were told that the Acceptance in Lieu Scheme had proved invaluable to archives services since it enables institutions to acquire pre-eminent material without having to finance major purchases, and the number of such acquisitions has been rising steadily.[376] But we were also told that some owners had avoided export controls by breaking up collections prior to sale, thereby reducing the value of each export to below the threshold at which licences were needed, but also destroying much of the research value of the individual archives.[377]

Authors' manuscripts

186. One of the areas in which these developments have been giving rise to increasing concern is that of literary archives relating to modern and contemporary British authors. These range in content from drafts of unpublished and published works, usually undergoing significant changes, to business and financial papers, diaries and personal correspondence.[378] The Working Group on the UK Literary Heritage told us that it had been recognised as far back as the 1950s that public collections were not acquiring the archives of modern authors, and the nation continues to see the papers of its pre-eminent writers being sold to institutions overseas, primarily in the United States: once lost to the UK, archives never return as they are not brought onto the market again.[379] At an informal meeting we held with members of the group, Professor Andrew Motion, the Poet Laureate stressed the importance of the "magic value" of the original, echoing Philip Larkin's memorable distinction between "the magic" and "the meaningful": the magic value of the original was not achievable with copies.

187. The Group estimates the current annual expenditure by UK public institutions on the literary archives of living writers resident in the UK for tax purposes as being in the region of £500,000-£1,000,000, with purchases often assisted by funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) or the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF):[380] values of the archives of already important contemporary writers ranged from £30,000 to £50,000. It told us that there was a perception amongst authors that their interests would be better served by US institutions where there was more money and quicker cataloguing, although there was anecdotal evidence that authors would otherwise prefer their archives to be held within the UK.[381] The British Library and other witnesses referred to American institutions being able to operate in this marketplace more effectively than most British institutions with the difference lying partly in the culture of giving which operates in the United States encouraged by the taxation treatment given to institutions there. [382]

188. The Group has proposed to the Treasury "two modest changes to the existing schemes which would benefit collecting institutions and living authors". One was the extension of the "douceur" arrangement, which already applies to inheritance and capital gains tax, to income tax: this would encourage authors (who currently pay income tax on any proceeds from the sale of their archives) to choose to sell to designated public institutions in the UK. The Group argues that the extension of the douceur would be of minor financial cost to HM Treasury, while the long term significance to UK collections would be great. The other was to extend the Acceptance in Lieu scheme (AIL, which is widely employed as a means of securing archives after the death of the writer) to living writers: no funds would be exchanged until after the writer's death, but the Group believes that the extension would be immensely important in securing those collections which are on loan to public institutions. Although the Group's emphasis was on literary manuscripts, the proposals and initiatives had a potentially broader scope which would include the archives of historians, scientists, economists and screen writers.[383]

189. We share the concern that the literary archives of some of our most important writers are being lost overseas for relatively modest sums. We recommend that the "douceur" arrangement should be extended to income tax which may be payable by creators on sales of their archives to designated public institutions in the UK and that the Acceptance in Lieu Scheme should be extended to allow living creators to offer their archives to such institutions in exchange for promised tax relief on their deaths.

The Archives Task Force

190. The Government Policy on Archives was issued by the Lord Chancellor in December 1999 following which DCMS invited the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council to set up the Archives Task Force to analyse the needs for developing the sector to its full potential. The Task Force reported in 2004, with proposals to revolutionise access to archives through an on-line, one-stop-shop gateway, and a programme of modernisation and improvement through better training for archive staff, investment in community archives, collections and the creation of innovative partnerships.[384] The recommendations were individually costed as requiring investment of £12 million over three years. The Secretary of State for Culture Media and Sport welcomed the report as a "cogent plan for tackling weaknesses and building on strengths".[385] But, the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) told us, the Secretary of State "made clear to MLA that in the short term it would be necessary to rely on existing resources to implement the recommendations".[386] Evidence from the sector indicated an overall welcome of "a very well researched and consulted upon piece of work",[387] and its recommendations, which "would have transformed the archive sector and modernised its services and workforce,",[388] although the Association of Chief Archivists in Local Government (ACALG) told us that its members generally (in common with many others in the archive community, including users) felt that the report did not state strongly enough that major investment in both buildings and services was required if the sector was to play the role it potentially could in supporting communities, learning and the economy".[389] We heard that some of the key actions had been taken forward by the MLA's partners without extra funding,[390] but that "the hopes of the archive sector were severely dashed" by MLA's failure to secure any funding for implementation,[391] and that there was "little evidence of positive support" for the sector since the commissioning of the Archives Task Force.[392] ACALG urged for "recognition of the need to establish a programme parallel to Renaissance in the Regions, which would seek to redress the long term under-funding and also enable the radical modernisation and capacity extension of archive services, so that they could play the part they must to ensure that records are preserved and accessible in the future for all sections of the community". [393]

191. Mr Chris Batt, Chief Executive of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, told us that the Archives Task Force recommendations still presented the framework needed to move forward. He said that some work had been done, with MLA using £2 million of its own core funding.[394] It had, with The National Archives and other strategic partners, put an unsuccessful bid into Heritage Lottery Fund to deliver the archives gateway, but MLA wanted to find ways in which it could work in partnership to find ways of moving the archives gateway forward.[395]

192. It is a matter of regret that the Government, while recognising the cogency of the recommendations of the Archives Task Force for developing the sector to its full potential, decided in the short term not to provide any funding for their implementation. The Museums, Libraries and Archives Council should press DCMS and the Government to provide financial support—which need only be relatively modest—to enable the archive sector to take forward the recommendations of Archives Task Force, and generate its own "renaissance".

311 National Council on Archives Ev 76 Back

312 Ev 54 Q59 Back

313 Ev 51 Back

314 Devon Family History Society Ev 289, the Federation of Family History Societies Ev 303 Back

315 The Federation of Family History Societies Ev 303 Back

316 The National Archives Ev 51, Mr Nick Kingsley, Head of National Advisory Services at the National Archives Ev 53 Q55, Ms Ruth Savage, Policy and Development Officer at the National Council on Archives Ev 83 Q103, Devon Family History Society Ev 289, The Federation of Family History Societies Ev 303, West Midlands Regional Archive Forum Ev 414 Back

317 National Council on Archives Ev 76, Mr Jonathan Pepler, Chairman of the National Council on Archives Ev 81 Q93 Back

318 Ev 53 Q55 Back

319 National Council on Archives Ev 77 Back

320 MLA Ev 214 Back

321 The National Archives Ev 49 Back

322 British Library Ev 33 , DCMS Ev 235 Back