This guidance is designed to help you engage with bid and creative teams to position the archive as a delivery partner, and to help you collect an archive of the project. An archive of the project will help future generations to understand what happened, who was involved, and how it changed local places, communities, and individuals. It will also help to evidence the work of creative professionals, community groups, the third sector, business and local government in centring culture, and using it as a way of bringing people together.
Working with colleagues and partners across your own organisation and others can also act as an opportunity to increase the visibility of your archive service and its work, and as a catalyst for key areas of work such as digital preservation, collections development, and widening access.
This guidance has been able to draw upon the experiences and reflections from archivists, producers, individuals from creative teams and senior managers with responsibility for heritage and culture. This includes colleagues from London Boroughs of Culture (Waltham Forest (2019), Brent (2020), Lewisham (2022) and Croydon (2023)), Cities of Culture (Hull (2017), Coventry (2021) and Bradford (2025), alongside Leeds’ Year of Culture 2023 and colleagues from Knowsley and St Helen’s – two of the five Liverpool City Region Boroughs.