Deciding what to collect or preserve
In establishing an archive, you need to start by taking several key decisions that will help you to focus on your subject or organisation, firstly by deciding what you will collect. This will stop you collecting material which doesn’t have permanent value. It is impossible to keep everything that a person, project or organisation creates, as this would be financially unsustainable and create difficulties in managing the collection.
Having a clear statement about what you want to keep in your archive will ensure that all the people involved are following the same rules. Don’t forget that this also applied to digital records, where we can’t as easily see the amount of material in an archive collection, but are still paying to store and maintain this material.
Creating a collections policy
Having decided what your archive will collect, you can describe this in your collecting policy. This is a simple statement, agreed by all the necessary people e.g. Board of Trustees, steering group, partners. It states:
- Why you are the right body to collect these archives. Are you the governing body? Family Trust? Executors?
- The boundaries of your archive, namely the subject or themes, the geographic area covered and the age.
- The type of material that will be held. Will you hold digital and paper items? How about film, sound or other objects? This decision will depend on your organisation. For example, if you are a charity specialising in oral history work, you will likely collect paper and digital items relating to the history of the charity as well as the oral histories themselves, but you may also have sound recordings on non-digital media.
- What won’t you collect? Be as clear as possible where the boundaries sit in your collecting. Its also useful to state why you won’t collect an item. Such as news cuttings are available elsewhere or you don’t have the correct environment to store certain materials e.g. film and sound.
- On what basis will you acquire archives? Internal transfer only? Donation? Purchase? Some archive services also allow deposit, where you can retain ownership of the archive, but the archive service stores and provides access to it. You can find out more about this at XXXX
As your archive develops and grows, your collecting policy will develop into a collection development policy which highlights gaps, priorities for collecting etc.
If you are a current organisation, you can develop your collecting policy by reviewing the records you keep and identifying how long you need to keep each type of record for your day to day work. Sometimes this decision is directed by legal requirements e.g. if you are a charity, or if you complete tax returns then there are time periods that dictate how long you need to retain material.
Creating a retention schedule
Sometimes the length of time you need to keep a record for your work is influenced by the type of work you do. e.g. an organisation that manages ancient buildings may need to keep maintenance records longer than others. You should also record the ultimate destination for every record e.g. destruction, archive, keep for day to day work.
This information can be written in a retention schedule that lists each type of record in your organisation, how long to keep it for and whether it should eventually form part of the archive. This could look something like this extract from a retention schedule, based on a charity archive:
Record series: Memorandum and Articles of Association/charter/governing documents
Retain: Permanently
Action: Transfer to archive when superseded
Reason why: Historical and legal (evidence of titles)
Relevant legislation or guideline: Charities Act 2011, Companies Act 2006
Notes: Vital record, paper and electronic formats
Record series: Trustee appointments and appointment correspondence
Retain: Permanently
Action: Transfer to archive at end of trusteeship
Reason why: Historical
Relevant legislation or guideline: General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
Notes: Vital record
Record series: Trustee register of interests
Retain: 20-year review
Action: Destroy
Reason why: Administrative
Relevant legislation or guidance: none
Notes: Hard copy and electronic formats
Bringing archives together
As part of this process you may need to ask people across your organisation or community what archives and records they have relating to your collecting area. You can do this by a survey, either remotely, that people complete themselves or by contacting relevant people and visiting them to see the archives.
Keeping a detailed list of the items you find is important. You should record what the material is, where it has come from, how much there is and crucially, exactly where it is located. If people give you material you should create a detailed record, including their contact details, the background to the material and any restrictions to its future use. This applies to material from both people in your organisation and outside your organisation. There is further advice on managing the ownership of archives on the Ownership and rights page of this guidance
Assessing what should be preserved permanently
Definition of Appraisal:
Appraisal is the process of determining whether records and other materials have permanent (archival) value.
It is important to consider that the value of a document may change over time. If you have doubt about whether a document should be permanently preserved you could retain it, with a view to reconsidering its entry into the archive in a few years’ time. This could be recorded in your survey or retention schedule.
One of the most difficult tasks that you may be faced with when you start to develop an archive is deciding whether individual documents should be kept permanently in the archive. Archivists call this appraisal.
There are a number of questions that can guide you in deciding whether to keep an item in the archive:
- Do the items fit within your collecting policy?
- Are you legally able to hold them?
- Do you have the resources to care for the archives? Would they be better cared for elsewhere that has the correct storage conditions or that holds associated archives?
- Have the items come from a key person, department or function of an organisation? Or do they describe important events or actions of a person or organisation? Were the archives created for a key purpose? Such as a contract for the sale of a football player.
- Will the documents tell future researchers and staff about important decisions, events or activities of your organisation or locality? For example a company deciding to withdraw from activity in a particular country or to develop a new product.
- Are the documents authentic and reliable?
- Are they well-ordered and complete?
- Will they help you to tell the story of your organisation, locality or subject? Are they visually attractive? Or are they vital to maintenance and development of infrastructure? Such as maps created to install sewers document Victorian Britain.
- Are these records likely to be of interest to researchers for academic purposes or to local or family historians?