The National Archives Strategy 2025–2030

Our strategy

The National Archives’ mission is to collect and preserve the public record, to connect citizens with their history through unrivalled collections and to partner with archives everywhere. In 2038 we will celebrate the bicentenary of the founding of the Public Record Office, and our 2038 vision is for The National Archives to be the living digital archive of the state. 

This strategy charts our path to making that vision a reality, setting out clear choices and priorities. 

This is a strategy for change: we have identified problems we will solve, new ways of working we will adopt and opportunities we intend to seize. With this strategy we begin in earnest the work of reshaping The National Archives for the future. 

This is a strategy that embraces the enduring mission of The National Archives in its full complexity and potential: we are a source of information and inspiration, of evidence and experiences. The power of encounters with the physical archive and the utility of digital and digitised records are both squarely at the heart of our vision for the living digital archive. 

This is a strategy that reaches out beyond The National Archives: at the heart of our mission is the need to secure the future of the record – of government and the courts and in the wider archives sector, while also supporting and learning from our global peers as we seek to tackle the same challenges. The increasingly digital record will be secured only through expert leadership, the confident exploration of new technologies, cutting-edge research and deep collaboration. 

This is a strategy for a critical moment in our history: there are new and rapidly developing threats to our security and resilience as an information organisation that we need to understand and counter, and we will. The emergence of new technologies, including artificial intelligence, will also make possible genuine, game-changing transformation for The National Archives and the people we serve. 

Finally, this is a strategy for growth: it will enable a growing collection, a higher profile, greater impact and, through the reshaping of our digital offer, a massively more valuable archive.

In developing this new strategy, we have understood that: 

• Current practices in record keeping in government fall short of what is needed to assure the future of the public record 
• The wider archives sector is increasingly vulnerable
• We are appreciated by those who are aware of what we hold and what we do, but our profile lags behind the value we can offer 
• People’s access to our holdings is too often constrained by physical location and cost 
• In common with other archives and cultural organisations, cyber security is an increasing area of risk, particularly for digital preservation 
• Our reliance on legacy technology for running our public services at Kew continues to inhibit our resilience, limit our capacity to secure and manage the growing digital archive and frustrate our ambition to offer a genuinely world-class service to our users 
• Our ability to bring rapidly developing technologies such as artificial intelligence to bear on the collection to enhance its usefulness is an opportunity still to be realised 
• We have an increasingly significant role to play internationally 
• Our duty to future generations must be expressed both through our work as an archive and our environmental sustainability 
• We must serve all our audiences, celebrating their differences, and aspiring to put inclusivity at the heart of all we do.

We will therefore:

Lead the future of archives

We will address the challenges of records management capability in government and resilience in the wider archives sector, and use our expertise at an international level to help solve common problems: 

• Work with government departments, the courts and public inquiries to enhance their capability to deliver sensitivity-checked digital records at scale and on time 
• As leader of the wider archives sector, drive implementation of the Government’s new Vision for Archives 
• Develop proposals for legislative change to the Public Records Act 1958, and the wider regime for access to the historical public record 
• Invest in our international thought leadership, promote our expertise and develop opportunities to enhance UK soft power.

Increase our profile

We will increase our profile, to deliver reach and impact through a more targeted, integrated creative public programme planned on a longer timescale: 

• Do fewer, bigger and better things based on a more sophisticated understanding of ‘what works’ 
• Establish a national presence for our education offer, embedding the use of archives in the national curriculum, connecting to higher education and research, and powering life-long learning 
• Launch an ambitious Domesday Book experience that combines virtual and physical elements 
• Work with The National Archives Trust to secure new charitable/philanthropic funding and generate partnerships to achieve these ambitions.

Widen availability and reshape place

We will expand the digital availability of the physical record, while evolving the places from which the collection is encountered and made useful: 

• As the first stages of a decisive shift to a digital-enabled model of access: 
  • Create an access model for born-digital records at scale 
  • Widen the availability of digital content created through digitisation on-demand, reading room self-digitisation and targeted digitisation 
  • Enhance the discoverability of the collection 
  • Drive economies of scale in our digitisation-on-demand services 
• Develop new funding models to underpin this shift, based on an understanding of the needs of our different audiences, e.g., public, research, industry, legal 
• Shape The National Archives’ future vision for ‘place’, providing the right mix of spaces for public engagement, digitisation, storage and our people, including consideration of a second site.

Renew our technology

To enable all these priorities we will upgrade our technology estate so that the quality of our best and most modern systems is matched by renewed infrastructure that fully supports the living digital archive and users’ interactions with it: 

• Undertake a programme of technological transformation that involves both remedial works to replace legacy systems and modular modernisation 
• Minimise cyber risk and build organisational resilience by investing in cloud-native systems and services organised around a coherent architecture 
• Seize the opportunities presented by artificial intelligence to realise efficiency, reform and economic value:
  • Developing Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled and enhanced services to improve and facilitate effective, timely transfer of government records 
  • Enabling our holdings for AI consumption and exploitation 
• Provide a world-class digital experience for our users.

In this strategy we have set out an ambitious programme of change. To deliver it we will develop costed plans, a new operating model for The National Archives and an institution shaped to meet the challenges and opportunities to come. The skills and expertise of The National Archives’ staff are critical to all that we do, and we will continue to invest in equipping our people to create this future. 

The living digital archive of the state will be a unique and invaluable asset, enriching citizens’ daily lives, generating value for the nation and securing the record for the future. Its promise is rich, its moment is at hand, and we are determined to make it a reality.