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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 increased demand on all services offered by The National Archives, combined with a fixed budget, means that we are presented with a difficult challenge. The only way to meet this challenge is to reduce our running costs by £4.2 million per year, allowing us both to manage within our budget and keep investing in the future.
Meeting the challenge
We have managed to find around 80% of these savings 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 over the summer, we will implement the following changes to public services over the next six months:
- 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)
- Changes to copying and microform services, with the aim of simplifying the process for visitors.
- Free access to original documents on site held in our repositories will continue as normal, and the current level of historical records expertise will be 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.
