Dear colleagues,

With apologies for any cross posting

I am contacting the list about a research project that I am undertaking
with my colleague Sophia Mirchandani, for MLA North East about archives
and their tourism potential.

BACKGROUND
This is the first stage of a project to identify the opportunities for
archives to develop their potential to contribute to the tourist economy. 
This project is being developed by MLA North East in association with
Northumberland Tourism, the Area Tourism Partnership for Northumberland. 
Funding for this first stage has been awarded by the MLA.

PROJECT PURPOSE
a.	To audit existing UK wide research on, and examples of, archives
organisations as tourist destinations or where archives organisations or
collections are an identifiable part of a tourist offer. It is expected
that this will largely be a desk research exercise, collating known and
reported examples. Key international examples should also be identified.

b.	To identify the current regional profile of North East archive users at
the four County Record Offices from existing data.

The outcome of the research will be presented in a final report detailing
the range, nature and type of archive tourist activity identified, draw
out any common themes, issues, barriers and opportunities as well as
detailing the current user profile of North East county record offices.

HOW CAN YOU HELP
Your organization may be involved in contributing to the tourism economy
because of a particular strength in your collections.  For the purposes of
the project we are defining a “tourist” loosely and are using it to mean a
user, physical or virtual, that is drawn from a geographical area that is
outside your current geographical collecting remit.  Depending on your
organization, therefore, it could mean regional, national or international
use that generates additional income either for your organization and/or
in the local economy. We are interested in activity where you maybe a
partner in a larger service or programme that involves other tourism,
heritage and cultural partners, as part of a larger offer.  We are also
interested in any ideas you may have about growing archives contribution
to the tourist economy.

If you are involved in activity, we would be grateful if you could email
me off list, so that, if relevant, I can provide you with a simple
template to complete that will help is build up a series of case study
examples. In return, we can offer to provide you with a copy of the final
report, which maybe of interest to you and which will, in any case, be
available through the MLA Partnership.

For those archive services which have records that support family history
research, we are particularly interested in understanding more about those
who are tracing their ancestry outside your usual catchment area: whether
such usage is growing or declining, where it comes from geographically,
whether you quantify it physically or virtually, its relationship to
commercial providers, how you meet such demand and whether your service
could be grown given the resources to do so.

If you have any questions, do please contact me.

Many thanks for your cooperation,

Katie Norgrove
Cultural Consulting Network
T: 07919 140747
E: [log in to unmask]




Katie Norgrove
Cultural Consulting Network
E: [log in to unmask]
T: 07919 140747 (UK)
T: 00 39 339 822 1291 (Italy)