Archives have always been an underfunded sector, and I don’t see that changing any time soon. A lot of the time this is out of our control. The cost of living is ever increasing and budgets at almost all organisations are being squeezed ever tighter. In a world where everyone needs more money, archivists have to learn the skills of financial planning and making their budgets stretch as far as possible while also being ready to take full advantage of any small funding pots which may become available. This blog looks at some of the issues the sector has with funding and perhaps look at some possible solutions, if there are any.
One of the main issues facing the sector is project funding. This is of particular concern in the world of digital preservation and digitisation. Project funding used to focus on short terms contracts to catalogue collections or carry out a specific promotional activity. Although not ideal, this type of project provides additional resource for a set piece of work that would not otherwise happen due to resource constraints. However, more recently, project funding has focused on digitisation as a means of preserving vulnerable collections and making them more accessible. This work is important, but it is not project work. Once the items are digitised, the digital copies need to be preserved. This is ongoing work. And the platform hosting the images online needs to be financed, maintained and kept in working order. This is also ongoing work. Viewing digitisation as a short term funded is problematic, particularly when that funding is given to community groups with limited resources in the first place.
Funding for short term archivist contracts can also be problematic if the organisation does not already have an archivist in place. Contracting someone to create an archive catalogue and make items available without resource available to continue the work after the contract has ended is problematic and puts records at risk. Short term contracts should always be a supplementary provision,
The recent relaunch of the Archives Revealed funding programme by the UK National Archives is a great boost to the UK archive sector. Real thought has been put into the types of grants available and what work will be funded. It is however interesting that those applying for consortium or cataloguing grants much spend 20% of their award on promotional activity, which can include digitisation, but no mention is made of a requirement to correctly preserve this content once the funding runs out. If a well-established National Archive hasn’t produced guidelines on this, then how can the smaller organisations be expected to forward plan to this extent?
It’s also interesting that one of the funding partners in the Archives Revealed Programme is the National Lottery Heritage Fund, who are on of the main contributors to the short-term funded projects across the archive sector. I think that funders do need to start taking responsibility for the projects they are funding and think more about the sustainability of them. Perhaps funding less projects but giving more money for longer term preservation should be a consideration. Ensuring that a project has resource to continue in some way when funding runs out should also be a consideration when awarding money to organisations.
But there is also an onus on the organisations and archivists themselves to ensure that any funding application is thought through to the very end and the sustainability of any projects is kept at the forefront when deciding what to apply for. Our main focus in this situation as in any other, is the collections in our care and there is no point having collections digitised if we can’t them preserve those copies. Resource is a great thing, but it needs to be invested in the right places.
The Un-Accessioned Archivist 