About the survey

The Annual UK Archive Sector Survey asks archive services to provide core data on four areas of activity:

  1. Finance
  2. Workforce & Volunteering
  3. Collections Management
  4. Access & Engagement

This data will help to prove the value of archives, both locally and nationally. It also helps archive services to benchmark their work.

This survey enables sector leadership organisations in each of the four home nations to understand the impact of the archive sector across the UK, to advocate on its behalf to funding bodies and national governments in order to sustain investment in the sector.

Benefits of a sector wide survey

We identified six benefits to undertaking a sector-wide survey of archive services in the UK:

  1. Such a survey helps us gain an understanding of the varied nature of the archive sector. (18 Categories ranging from LAs to Community archives)
  2. Despite the varied nature, we managed to identify common themes and trends, some of which we will describe in our presentation.
  3. The survey allowed us to identify areas of activities undertaken by archives that require improvement.
  4. Importantly, the data gathered from such a comprehensive survey helps The National Archives and other national bodies advocate on behalf of archives to funders and stakeholders at local, regional, and national levels.
  5. The data also allows us to base our decision-making on objective information.
  6. Finally, the survey provided archive services with data that will enable them to benchmark their performance against other similar services.

Using data to solve problems

We hope to be able to use the data collected in this survey to help solve problems in the archive sector, using the following approach:

  1. Collect data – by gathering a plethora of data, we can challenge our assumptions and generate useful questions such as: How large are cataloguing backlogs? What are the most popular archive collection management systems? What is the average size of a service’s digital archive collection?
  2. Identify trends – we can use the data to spot patterns, gaps and anomalies
  3. Generate solutions – we can use the data and the identified trends to validate existing solutions or to inspire new ideas for suitable solutions. We can use the data to set goals and identify the required resources when implementing the solutions
  4. Collect more data and evaluate solutions – The new data collected in successive annual survey can help us evaluate the solutions we’ve implemented as a sector. By comparing the data before and after implementation, we can learn from our successes and failures and make adjustments and enhancements to our chosen solutions.