Card complaint
In her excellent article ‘ The state of archives’ ( July), Rosemary Collins discusses the “shrinking resources” of the archives and quotes Geoff Pick, the chair of the Archives and Records Association (ARA), as saying, “There’s always a pressure on public service archives to be able to deliver within those budgets, and in some areas those budgets have reduced dramatically over the years.”
It is clear from this and other comments that the ARA is fully aware of the financial difficulties many archives are struggling with. Why then has the ARA launched a new County Archives Research Network (CARN) reader ticket scheme called the Archives Card, which requires
many archives to pay much more than the original scheme?
The CARN scheme was introduced in 1983 and was very similar to a library card system. Not all archives used this scheme, and The National Archives (TNA) has its own independent system. This scheme was operated and subsidised by the ARA for many years, but in its view needed to be modernised as the original system ran on “predigital technology”.
In September 2017 the ARA published a tender for a new system, still available at www.archives.org. uk/images/CARN/Archives_Card_
tender_September_2017.pdf, and one of its objectives stated that it should “Provide an affordable, efficient system for participating offices. [The] cost of annual membership will meet the expectations of participating members, [the] system of issuing cards is suitable for use in large and small offices [and] staff time in issuing cards minimised via advance online registration. Ongoing austerity means we need to keep costs competitive.”
This new digitalised Archives Card is due to be implemented this year. However, many of the archives I have been in contact with cannot afford the new system. One small archive has disclosed that the costs of the new scheme represent a 400 per cent increase in annual fees it currently pays towards the CARN scheme. In addition there will be a one-off ‘startup payment’ of about £1,000, as well as additional costs for purchasing the equipment to produce and read the cards. For small archives and those facing dramatically reduced budgets, this is a prohibitive cost.
In May I received an email from the Federation of Family History Societies stating that this new Archives Card was under threat, as only 40 local authorities had signed up to the scheme (68 local authorities had signed up to
the original CARN card scheme), and unless at least 20 local authorities sign up to the scheme before 31 May 2018, “it will not be financially viable and will not happen”. The email asked me to “lobby your local archives and councillors to encourage them to sign up to the new scheme.”
When archives are struggling to survive, why would the ARA agree to a scheme that several archives and local authorities would not be able to afford, and then ask researchers to apply pressure to try to force them to sign up, especially when we were not given the details of the financial costs involved? We should be supporting our local archives, not pushing them to spend money they cannot afford.
Anne Sherman
Editor replies: Thank you for writing in Anne. I’m sure your concerns are shared by others. We understand from talking to our contacts at ARA that the deadline has been extended. We will cover further developments in the magazine.