A strategy for national collections

TNA has launched The National Collections Strategy with a draft document for consultation, available from TNA website. The aim behind this initiative is to locate areas of weak representation in archival collections and collecting institutions in England and Wales, and make them stronger. Potentially, this is big news. But before offering too much praise, here are my negative points: I’m sceptical of these types of all-encompassing endeavours that aim to achieve broad overviews and wide reaching changes/improvements. My first questions would be: where is the money coming from? Who will pay the staff to carry out the research, and how much? How long will these posts be funded for? Once gaps are identified, who will pay for the community engagement, transfer, storage, processing, cataloguing, access-related-costs, etc of all the new material? My concerns are mostly economic, but human too. Will staff in local record offices, libraries and charities be given even greater backlogs plus added responsibility for public and internal outreach? Will support be given to libraries or record offices threatened with closure or funding cuts?

These concerns aside, I'm in favour of a national collections strategy. Active engagement with potential donors and sources of deposit-able material is important work. Likewise, cooperation and coordination of collecting activities is important. And I believe it’s crucial that gaps in collections and collecting missions are identified and addressed. This is particularly true, obviously, because a lot of material will be electronic. Fuller histories and better understanding come from fuller archives.