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Changes at The National Archives
The National Archives is a world-class institution and one of the most successful archives globally. We give access to more records, more quickly than any other archive. Our expertise in information management and preservation is unparalelled and we play a lead role in capturing the public record for future generations.
Our challenge
The National Archives has been hugely successful in bringing history to life to more and more people, and is actively working to make sure that today's information and decisions survive to become tomorrow's history. But we have a fixed budget, which means that we cannot keep doing more. We therefore consulted in 2009 on proposals to reduce our running costs, allowing us both to manage within our budget and keep investing in the future.
Meeting the challenge
We were successful in identifying around 80% of the savings that we needed to make through internal efficiencies and changes which will not affect public service delivery. However, it was not possible to find all of the savings in this way so, following an extensive consultation, we implemented the following changes to public services:
- Moving to a five-day week (Tuesdays to Saturdays) from January 2010, with an extension of opening hours and document ordering times over these days
- Charging for use of the visitors' car park with an annual season ticket available for frequent visitors (based on vehicle emissions, in keeping with government guidelines). This is to be implemented in 2011
- Changes to copying and microform services, with the aim of simplifying the access of material for visitors
- Free access to original documents on site held in our repositories continue as normal, and the current level of historical records expertise have been maintained
Full details on the changes can be found in the presentation that took place at the user forum on 24 September 2009.
Presentation of our final plans for changes at The National Archives (PDF, 1.82Mb)
The future
We are confident that our plan is the best way to ensure the sustainability of this world-class archive in a challenging environment. We will continue to provide high quality on site access to our collection, to increase online access and to capture current government information for future researchers, ensuring the continuity of the official government record.This page contains PDF files. See plug-ins and file formats for help in accessing these file types.
