Archives at the millennium: the twenty-eighth report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts 1991-1999
Full details
| Authors & editors | |
| Publisher | HM Stationery Office |
| Year of publication | 1999 |
| Languages | |
| Medium | Digital |
| Edition | 1 |
| Topics | |
| Tags | |
| Scope & content | Selected content Page 17 Likely public demand for access to any given material (however attractive as a yardstick against which expenditure on acquisition, cataloguing and care can be justified) can be a dangerous guide when it comes to selection. Only a tiny minority of potential researchers may need to see the most detailed technical documentation of industrial processes or machinery, and as the Science Museum pointed out, ‘the constraints which cause it to surface and be lost often coincide with those which prevent publicly funded repositories accepting it’. Nevertheless, selection policies which exclude such documentation, on the grounds of its bulk or the likely low level of usage, can actually frustrate one whole strand of research. It could also be said that by restricting acquisitions policy to archival materials for which there is an established current d emand, repositories will overlook the future value of very modern material. Indeed, concern is already being expressed by contemporary historians about the rate of loss of papers created during the last thirty years. Page 51 The assumption that national bodies can be sweepers up of material that cannot find another home is being challenged, but public expectations sometimes outrun the funding realities, as for example with the expectation that the National Railway Museum will be the home of last resort for all railway records. The British Museum and the Science Museum told us that they make strenuous efforts to find other suitable homes for proffered material for which they are not the logical custodian. But then what happens in the last resort? The Science Museum, for example, told us that it takes in ‘collections in the general field of physical science and technology for which there is no suitable local or specialist repository’, and emphasised its concern (which is alluded to elsewhere in this report) about gaps in the provision nationwide for scientific and technical archival material. Similarly the Natural History Museum argued for a degree of flexibility in collection policies to ensure that records at risk found a home. |
| Web URL | https://cdn.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/information-management/archmill.pdf |