WORK 29/3284 Time passes: for the clock face of ‘Big Ben’ as for the rest of us!
It’s a year today since The National Archives formally took over the sector leadership responsibilities of the former Museums, Libraries and Archives Council. It seems like a good moment to reflect on what has changed and how far we have come.
What’s happened since then? Quite a bit!
- We’ve refreshed the action plan to accompany the government policy Archives for the 21st Century, taking account of changes to the sector and renewing the deliverables to take us up to 2015.
- We’ve launched a new section of The National Archives website, to support our work with the archives sector.
- We are developing our work with partners, including building key relationships with Arts Council England, the Archives and Records Association and the Local Government Association. In these challenging times, working in partnership is more important than ever if we’re to deliver our remit.
- We’ve continued to create and deliver key initiatives. We are now well into piloting the new archive service accreditation programme after an extensive co-creation exercise with the UK archives sector.
- We’re developing our engagement approach for the public archives sector while continuing our longstanding role in support of private archives.
- We’re delivering the Record of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, bringing core organisational records to The National Archives and supporting collection of records in local areas to document this memorable experience.
- We’re also helping the sector meet the Government’s transparency agenda by advising on the extension of the 20-year rule on records transferring to Places of Deposit.
- We’re renewing and extending our work on information resources, sharing collections knowledge with the millions who use The National Archives website and surveying records of the Architecture, Building and Construction industry.
- We’ve recently jointly published a report on Funding the Archives sector, outlining options for diversifying in future and supporting sustainable access to archives.
- We’re building a reference resource of guidance, case studies and statistics to evidence the impact of the archives sector and support good practice.
We’ve done a lot, but the journey is far from complete. We’ll be continuing to develop our sector leadership role in the coming months and years, and we look forward to keeping you up to date.