The Thin End Of The Wedge
Regarding the March issue’s news story on The National Archives’ trial for ordering documents, I think we should be worried as researchers over what TNA is doing. At a User Advisory Group on 3 December 2019 ( nationalarchives.gov.uk/ documents/uag-2019-12-03minutes.pdf) “TG advised that the changes will be introduced as a pilot from March 2020 as part of a gradual movement from an ‘on demand’ to an advance ordering service. On demand ordering has reduced from 80 per cent to 50 per cent of orders with little impact on user groups and TNA would like to extend this.” The actual notice that TNA put out ( nationalarchives. gov.uk/about/news/changes-todocument-ordering) is no longer on the front page of its website, and this is not good. I disagree that this has had little impact, as researchers are different – you can make statistics say anything.
What I think lies at the root of the issue is the lack of repository staff and TNA’s concentration on digital records. What I have seen
is a general reduction of services to researchers. We should not forget that TNA has also cut off about a third of the space in the Document Reading Room.
In 2017 you could order documents until 5pm, then it was reduced until 4pm and now this trial will reduce it to 3.30pm. In addition the waiting times for documents has steadily increased from 40 minutes to an hour and now an hour and 15 minutes. TNA did consider reducing the last orders for some documents to 3pm. In comparison the London Metropolitan Archives has a ‘last orders’ time of 4.20pm.
It seems to me that this trial could lead to further reductions in document-ordering times. When I look at series FO950 (Nazi persecution claims files) I often find that there are references to other documents I need to order, and this ‘trial’ could lead to me having to make a second visit. Researchers have pointed out that this could be an issue and increase their costs.
David Matthew, by email
EDITOR REPLIES: Have other readers been affected by the changes to ordering documents at TNA?