A question that often arises for archive services is whether they are the right place to store and provide access to a collection. You should already have a collecting policy or a collections development policy that describes your collection and its parameters. However, there are several further questions you should ask to be sure you are the right home:
- Can you provide the necessary access for internal and external users to study to research the material?
- Do you have the necessary storage conditions for the long term preservation of the archives ?
- Can you store the whole collection, if the whole collections is worthy of permanent preservation?
- Are there parts of the collection elsewhere which this collection refers to, or related collections? Might these archives be best stored together?
- Would the item be better preserved in a specialist collection? E.g. a regional film archives or subject specialist organisation?
- Legislation – Are you legally able to collect this? Should your care of the archives be registered anywhere?
- Have you confirmed that the donor has the legal right to the collection being offered?
Archives are collections of related records. It is vital that these connections are maintained as evidence of the context in which they were created and this can only be achieved if the order of records are managed. Understanding the origins of an item allows us to understand its significance. If census returns weren’t kept by year and in street order, we wouldn’t be able to uncover the full picture of the country in that year, gather the stories of our ancestors and to assess how reliable a record was.
This evidential role of archives mean they should be managed differently from how you might manage a collection of library books, for example, and we outline a few considerations in the next sections.