Dear All

As everything's been quiet- here's my twopenn'orth worth

The Archives Taskforce report has been eagerly awaited, not unreasonably, in the hope of lucrative funding streams that will enable us to sort out our problems once and for all. We might feel on first look at the report that it hasn’t fulfilled our expectations, but in my opinion, this is an opportunity that we need, as a profession, to support wholeheartedly. In fact we need to demand the funding the report recommends as our museum colleagues did successfully a few weeks ago.

There are some excellent recommendations in the report not least the Archive Development Programme which proposes that £3 million over three years should be identified. The programme has wide ranging aims from workforce development, outreach, education to support for specialist film and sound archives. Archivists have a long way to go in raising the profile of our collections, in showing how investment in our services will produce the results that the government agenda requires. This taskforce report cannot hand it us on a plate, we’ve got to lobby and shout and be seen. We need people doing interviews on TV, making people talk about the funding crisis for our written heritage.

Andrew Motion was on Radio 4 recently talking about the flood of British literary papers being bought by American Universities, would he be interested in supporting a report calling for funding to ensure that the facilities are available here to compete with those universities?

There is a lot of potential in the centres of excellence and quality assurance framework for collection care ideas and these might be the way forward in terms of developing networks to include local authority, business, university and specialist archives and to tackle the storage and sustainability problems services are facing.

Could we have a conference with heads of repositories attending to discuss the report and our desired outcomes? Then if possible come up with a plan, that we all support, to take it forward.

Let us at least talk about it!

Sam Collenette

Archivist

Bolton Archives and Local Studies

Personal capacity