About Archive Service Accreditation
Archive Service Accreditation provides an opportunity for archive services to consider how they acquire, preserve and provide access to their collections over the long term. It also represents a pathway for the ongoing development of a service, and is a reference point for archives across the UK.
What is Archive Service Accreditation?
Archive Service Accreditation is the UK Standard for archive services. The Standard looks at how an archive service acquires, preserves and provides access to their collections over the long term, through the management of risks and by planning for change.
Archive Service Accreditation also represents a pathway for the ongoing development of a service, and is a reference point for archives of different types and sizes across the UK.
It allows archive services to participate in a scheme supporting the ongoing development of their service against a nationally agreed standard.
Archive Service Accreditation also allows us to provide assurance that standards are being maintained by archive services that have been approved as Places of Deposit.
Benefits of Archive Service Accreditation
Use a nationally recognised framework to guide service development
The framework is useful for all archives, whether you are still developing your approach to collections management and access provision, or are a more established archive service seeking to benchmark and review your service delivery against a national standard.
Develop a greater understanding of your service’s role
Explore how your service fits into the wider organisation and where your practices work well or could be improved across the different areas of managing collections and providing access.
Demonstrate a visible and long-term commitment to your collections
Working with Archive Service Accreditation represents an investment on the part of the service into the management of archive collections in their care, both now and in the future.
Achieve a UK-wide standard and celebrate good practice
Accreditation is a chance to recognise achievement both within an organisation and more widely.
Coordinate the organisational management of your archive service
Archive Service Accreditation is aligned with other relevant quality assurance schemes, improvement tools and data gathering processes.
Is it relevant to our archive service?
Any organisation that holds archive collections can benefit from Archive Service Accreditation, whatever its constitution. It is appropriate for both private and public sector archives.
Archive Service Accreditation recognises that every archive service fulfils a different role. It takes account of governance arrangements and the legislative context of the archive service. Archive services may hold archive collections of different sizes and compositions and provide access to these collections in many different ways.
Relationship to Museum Accreditation
Archive Service Accreditation is designed to align with Museum Accreditation. Both share the same focus on organisational health, collections and the experiences of people who engage with the service. Both programmes have the same ethos of helping to raise standards and reward achievement.
Archive Service Accreditation focuses specifically on the needs of archive collections and their users. Museums with significant archive holdings are therefore encouraged to apply for Archive Service Accreditation, even if they already hold Museum Accreditation, to ensure that their archive collections are managed in line with current archival practice.