The National Archives

• Lead and transform information management

• Guarantee the survival of today’s information for tomorrow

• Bring history to life for everyone

Our vision

• A gigantic online transformation• Selection

• Access

• Advice

• Preservation

• Awareness

• Aims of the organisation

• Business practices

• Organisational culture

What’s happened to TNA

April 1997

“The Chancery Lane List Improvement Project has been completed after five years of strenuous effort by 33 staff and 34 specialist editors, producing 85 linear metres of new lists…

Over the next few years, working as rapidly as resources allow, our aim is to provide an on-line service to users all over the world, starting with finding aids, progressing to services and ordering systems and eventually to digitised images of the records themselves.”

1996-7 Annual Report

April 2007

What we have done

• From 1997: transcribed many of our paper catalogues

• Automated document ordering and copying

• Several generations of websites

• Scanned about 7m priority documents ourselves

• Awarded licences to private sector partners to digitise censuses, passenger lists, WW1 service records etc.

• Introduced search and wiki technology

• Paused for breath

Customer focus

• Tradition of formal consultation with readers

• Extended to online and cataloguing panels

• Focus groups, card-sorting etc.

• Input from front-line staff

• Suggestions and complaints all individually handled

• Increasingly an online archive

• Digitise popular records series, often funded by private sector (census etc.) or academic bodies (Cabinet papers)

• Remote advice/ordering of digital copies

• Make our catalogues and databases properly searchable

• Influence the creation and usage of information by government

• Open to risk

• Listen hard to what customers want

TNA’s digital strategy

• Google

• Broadband

• Information as a right, not a privilege

• Family history

• 1901 census launch

• Licensing to private sector

Decisive factors

What most

people want

What people mostly

get

New expectations

Where some would like us

to be

TIME

EASE OF ACCESS

We are here

Expectation

Reality

Inconvenient realities

…but easier for customers

• Visitors to Kew are UP

• Satisfaction at Kew is UP

• Access to public records is WAY UP

• The future is BETTER!

What we offer now

What we aim for

Useful metadata

about 10m+ documents

Search box

1. Results list

2. Results list

3. Results list

Document download

Information about how

to get document

Visit to Kew or another archive to

read document

Digital copy of document

Advice

Advice

Our catalogue

Other catalogues

Documents

• Ratio of online visits to onsite visits:

• Ratio of downloads to physical document deliveries:

• Percentage of documents usefully catalogued:

2007-8 Annual Report

>100:1

100:1

1%?

What we’ll do next

• Continue helter-skelter with private sector digitisation

• Tidy up our online catalogue to make it searchable

• Improve the way we present information to enable more self-help

• For 99.999% that will never be digitised commercially, find better ways of digitising on demand

• Get deep links to search engines

• Try and help the archive sector follow suit

Lessons

• Don’t launch censuses all in one day!

• Commitment to a long-term programme

• Consult everyone, and build what they want

• People will pay for something they value

• Importance of explaining what you are doing

• Try things out; if it doesn’t work, drop it!

• Awareness of the changing web context

• Prioritise

Things that will be different in future

• Search, search, search

• Knowing how to find, not what there is to find

• User/social contribution and interaction

• Volunteering

• Personalisation

• Storage and preservation

The hardest part

• Being online as a way of life, not an add-on

• Following where the web leads – 2.0 etc.

• UGC – customers as experts, not us

• Metadata and the archival profession

• Marketing and Kew

• Kew and our future

• Taking the traditional audience with us

Thank youThank you