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This page outlines the criteria to be used for assessment of The National Archives’ Scoping Grants. It is written to assist applicants and panel members, when writing and scoring proposals.

The aim of the Scoping Grants Programme is to assess unknown collections that may be of public value.

It is assessed on the following two criteria:

  1. Significance
  2. Impact

Each application will be scored numerically by each panellist, against each of the criteria above, according to the following scale:

Score  Rating 
1  Poor 
2  Low 
3  Good 
4  Excellent 
5  Outstanding 

 

Further information on each criterion is given below. This information is not intended to be exhaustive: an outstanding answer may not cover all of the points mentioned, and/or may cover other points as appropriate to the applicant and their project.

However, the information below should assist applicants in writing successful proposals, and will be provided to each panellist to guide their assessment.

1. Significance

The National Archives is committed to supporting the preservation and use of significant archival collections within the United Kingdom. You should aim to outline why your collection is important, unique and of clear value to your audiences, today and in the future.

Significance may be different for different audiences that engage with a collection, and it may be helpful to consider who they are. An academic may have a different goal, when engaging with a collection, than a family historian or community representative.

The prompts below may help you to think about why and how your collection is significant, but you do not need to cover all of them – you should focus your answer on your collection’s areas of strength:

  1. Provenance: who created, collected and has used the collection.
  2. Rarity: whether the collection is unique or unusual, and if it is a particularly fine example of a collection of its type.
  3. Condition and Completeness: whether the collection is intact and in good condition, and if its condition can tell us anything about its history, ownership or use.
  4. Historical, Cultural or Scientific Meaning: how the collection tells the story of particular people, groups, organisations, events, places, beliefs, or practices; whether it has special historic or cultural interest for an audience, region or community; whether and how it could be used for academic research; and whether it enriches or fills in gaps in other collections, at your organisation or elsewhere.
  5. Sensory and Emotional Impact: whether the collection has strong visual/sensory impact, or evokes a strong personal or cultural response; and whether the language, format, technique, design or style reflect outstanding creativity or innovation.
  6. Marketing and Exploitability: whether the collection could support marketing, income generation or profile-raising for your organisation or community.

Please ensure that the focus of your response is on the collection that you are intending to work with. The significance of the wider collections in your archive can be important, but your main focus should be on the collection that you are applying for.

If you want to find out more about significance statements, there is detailed guidance in this video: Archives Revealed: How to conduct a significance assessment and write a significance statement – YouTube

2. Impact

We define impact as “the demonstrable contribution that a project makes.” Tell us why your project is going to change things: for you, for your archive service, for your users and audiences, for the archives sector, or for society. We want to understand what difference your proposal will make, and what change will result from the project, and for whom.

Ask yourself ‘what will happen?’ What are the short-term, medium-term and long-term changes that the project will bring about, and who will be affected? Is the change physical (new resources, materials or capital), procedural, or cultural?

Impact should scale according to the size of the grant being provided: for smaller grants, impact may be personal (new skills or learning), or institutional (such as improved ways of working within your archive service). For larger grants, strong applications will evidence impact beyond their own organisation. Please read the question carefully, to ensure that you are focusing your answer on the relevant areas of focus.

It is also important to consider the impact that your project will have on users of your archive. The users of archives can be diverse, with audiences having different motivations and needs from your service. You are best placed to understand who your audiences are, and who they could be: it might be helpful to explain the change you want to bring about, in how existing users interact with your service and collections, and/or in how you reach new audiences.

You may wish to outline how you intend to engage with audiences outside of your institution: do you have plans or partnerships in place, to engage with (for example) your local community, researchers, schools or higher education?

It is important to consider how the grant will have an impact beyond its own duration, and create a sustainable legacy of change: is this project part of a longer-term strategic plan, and how does it align with other activities or the future direction of the organisation?

Impact can take many different forms, and every project will have a different response: but a strong answer will always clearly outline what outcomes it is seeking to create, and how it plans to engage with beneficiaries and audiences, inside and outside of the archive service which is applying.