Examination of Witnesses (Questions 55
- 59)
TUESDAY 31 OCTOBER 2006
BRITISH LIBRARY,
NATIONAL ARCHIVES
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 people 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 distributed archival system in the
country and records of local and regional significance are most
appropriately held there.
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