Colleagues,
This message is intended primarily for senior managers in local authority
archive services in England; my apologies for any annoyance to the rest of
you!
It is budget time again, and I have been asked to provide some benchmarking
evidence to support a bid for an additional cataloguer next year. Although
CIPFA stats give helpful data on the number of archivists, it would be
misleading to suggest that this alone is any guide of the amount of staff
time devoted to cataloguing. I wonder therefore if any English local
authority archivists who pick this message up could give me an indication of
how much time (in terms of FTEs) their office is able to devote to
cataloguing from core funding?
By this I exclude time spent on the management of collections, accessioning,
packaging (if carried out separately from cataloguing), and time devoted by
cataloguing staff to other activities such as searchroom support,
exhibitions and outreach work and so on. I also exclude temporary project
staff working on cataloguing projects. In Gloucestershire, for example, we
think that we spend the equivalent of 1.8 fte professional archivists and
0.5 fte support staff on cataloguing work thus defined. It would be helpful
if responses could similarly discriminate between professional and support
staff.
I am happy to make an analysis of responses and report back to the list if
this would be of interest. If anyone can point me to data already collected
on this subject, regionally or nationally, I would also be most grateful for
that.
Nick Kingsley
County Archivist, Gloucestershire
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