Background
A county archive service runs three sites, each of which has a public access site. They also have an out store in the county town which does not have public access. This out store is near to the main archive office, in an adapted industrial warehouse on a council site, which is shared with the council’s records management service. The archive storage is within a climate-controlled storage pod within the warehouse and contains only closed, uncatalogued or rarely used items.
Managing the out store service
Although the records management unit is manned during working hours, the archives store is not. Archive staff visit three times a week to make formal building and environment checks.
Documents at the out store are subject to a 48-hour notice period. Retrievals are made by archive staff travelling in their own cars.
The service has found that managing staff across three sites and an out store is inefficient. In the long-term the service is seeking to consolidate their resources across a smaller number of sites.
While the service does flag up where documents need to be ordered in advance from the out store, there are occasions when archive service users who have not booked in advance can be disappointed to find that documents are not immediately available.
Benefits and challenges of managing the split-site service
Benefits
- Reduction of overall security and building costs
- The problem of lone working for archive staff was removed because the site was also manned by records management staff
Challenges
- It takes staff time to retrieve items
- The site needs to be visited regularly to check on security and conditions
- Service users need to give 48 hours’ notice to access the collections