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Sue, I feel I must reply to some of the misunderstandings you have about my comments. At no point did I say I had difficulty getting local politicians to recognise the value of my work, only that the mechanism for setting fees and charges was in their control and based on the need to raise an income. We do take efficiency for both our time and our customers' time extremely seriously, and as I said our charge is based on the time required for the additional document production caused by the use of cameras. The forms are not of our making but due to copyright law and only apply to items copied not everything that is produced it is a required declaration that the copy is only for private use. Our fee is very simple to administer - you hand over your copyright form we count the number of references you have written on it (up to a maximum of 26 after which the maximum fee kicks in) and tell you what is owed, hardly takes a moment. In our definition a document is, as you say, an item, which could be one page or a volume with 500 pages. Our online catalogue generally doesn't tell you the number of pages a document contains but it is clear what an item is and staff will advise on this when you order things as you can only order 4 items per order ticket. My comment about education was about educational courses for history of all types that fail to include accurate or indeed any information about accessing and using archives - anyone who undertakes these courses deserves better. I made no comment or judgement about any researchers whatever the aim of their research or the method they use. I should have known better than to try to explain my position regarding charging for those things that are, and have always been, beyond the statutory free service. As far as I'm concerned this matter is now closed. Pamela Birch Service Manager Bedfordshire Archives ________________________________ From: Sue Adams [[log in to unmask]] Sent: 09 November 2016 17:59 To: Pamela Birch; [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: Re. Charging Customers for Use of own cameras & Genealogy education Thank you for your insights, Pamela. I agree with some of your comments. I am also frustrated by TV adverts and programs that suggest family history is as easy as clicking a button or can be done in an hour. I wish such programs included a 'How we did this' section, like quality wildlife programs, that demonstrate the 1000 hours research behind the program. I sympathise with the difficulties in getting local politicians to recognise value of your work. With regard to your archive's policy on self service photography, I think the approach fails to respect the user's time and is an inefficient use of staff time. Please forget photocopiers ever existed, and justify charges on current reality. A flat fee is simple to administer, so why waste staff time on counting copies? Please, please, please spend the staff time on the catalogue instead! From a user or customer perspective, it is your job to make their visit as efficient as possible for them. Even the most casual, inexperienced user deserves good service, which does not include replicating paperwork for your background purposes. Archive retrieval systems already record which documents the user accessed. A digital camera is as an essential research tool as a pencil and paper, so charging for documents copied by this method, discriminates against more organised researchers. Users who only wish to copy a few documents will soon learn to be more organised - once is all it takes. What is a 'document' in this context? Before travelling to your archive, users need to know if a manorial court book with 500 pages is one document or 500. Does your online catalogue record this information (likely a detailed item level description), to help users with their research? A flat fee makes that calculation simple for the user. I found your comments about family history and genealogy education particularly disparaging. It seems to me that your attitude towards people who undertake family history research, and especially those who pursue genealogy education is rather disrespectful. You have conflated traditional history with family history/genealogy. These are separate disciplines, with different approaches and aims. Genealogy educational opportunities are growing rapidly, with 2 UK universities offering Masters degrees. I compared offerings in March 2015 in Time for Formal Genealogy Education? <http://worldwidegenealogy.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/time-for-formal-genealogy-education.html> Family historians and genealogists are your core, loyal, and vocal supporters. Why would you alienate them? If you have any doubts about support for archives check out the Twitter and Facebook #explorearchives campaign. Sue Adams On 09/11/2016 09:09, Pamela Birch wrote: Bedford BC - OFFICIAL-Unsecure Sue's statement 'there is very little public education about how archives work, and it takes most users years to figure out the basics' is sadly true. In the hope that putting in my two pennies worth Sue will feel better informed here goes. It is not necessarily the fault of the archives we do try but our small voice gets lost amongst the other information out there - the TV adverts telling people how easy it is to do their family history at the click of a button, the media who don't show how they got from a-b and, not least, the school, university and online courses that make no attempt to explain how to find and use primary sources. In case you think the latter is a sweeping statement keep in mind that I offer work experience to university students at least three times a year and only two universities in the last 20 years have got good marks from me for including anything about archives and how to use them on their history degree courses. I also did a free online genealogy course earlier this year to see how they tackled the subject and was appalled by the content that was being put out under a university's name. One of the basic misunderstandings is that archives are like a chain of pizza restaurants or coffee shops where the menu and the price is the same throughout the country if not the world. We are not! We are small, independently run 'shops'. In most cases you can come in a browse for free but as soon as you wish to make a purchase local conditions apply and the price will reflect this. With most local authorities facing huge deficits anything that is not statutory either has to stop or make enough money to look as if it should continue (not the same as actually covering its costs). In some cases it is only because the service would cost more to stop doing than it does to keep running that it is allowed to continue at all but the expectation is that it will make a contribution to saving money by cutting costs or raising income. As far as taxes go other services take priority - adult and children social care have to be paid for and there are more road users driving over those pot holes than there are people using archives. In my own case I can make a recommendation about charges in September each year. This recommendation has to be based on a percentage increase on all charges as dictated from above (presumably set by the finance director of the council). Therefore I can only tweak things in the hope that I can balance the need for income against what the market will bear. The recommendation then goes back to finance who make it say what they wanted in the first place before it goes before council where the councillors make their own alterations before signing it off. The archive fees and charges are presented to them along with every other fee and charge in the entire local authority so there is no room for reasoned argument even if officers were allowed to talk to councillors, which they are not. Finally the spreadsheet comes back to me for implementation. I tried to make some larger changes to our scales this year to make them more realistic against actual cost but it remains to be seen what I will be told to implement. Now, regarding the issue of charging for camera use and the filling out of forms, others have pointed out reasons behind these so I will just explain the approach we took here. We needed to maintain income being lost as photocopying decreased and take account of the extra work involved in producing more documents for searchers who were ordering large quantities to photograph and then work on at home. We did not wish to disadvantage those people who only wanted one photograph of one document. Our approach was therefore to charge by the document produced and photographed up to a point when we had covered the additional work involved. Currently this stands at 65p per document up to maximum of £16.90 per day (all charges include VAT). If you order a document but don't copy it there is no charge, but if you photograph a document you can take as many shots of it as you like for private use under copyright regulations. We don't like the forms but in order to have a record of what was copied for private use (most of our holdings still having some copyright on them that does not belong to us) we have to have them, file them so that they can be referred back to (mostly when people say 'can you tell me what this photograph is of I forgot to take down the reference?') and store them, which costs money. All the researcher has to do is put the references of the documents photographed on the form, hardly arduous on their part. Regards Pamela Birch Service Manager (Archives Records) Bedfordshire Archives & Records Service 800 years of history, 100 years of service. Open: Mon 9.15am-5pm (5-7pm by prior appointment only), Tues, Wed & Fri 9am-5pm. If you wish to visit please contact us (01234 228833 or [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]><mailto:[log in to unmask]><mailto:[log in to unmask]>) to make a booking. Closed Thursday. 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