The UK Annual Archive Sector Survey will open on 6 January 2025 and close on 14 March 2025
Purpose of the survey
The purpose of the UK Annual Archive Sector Survey 2025 is to gather evidence to help demonstrate the social and economic importance of archives to funders and stakeholders – locally, regionally, and nationally – and to provide archive services with data to enable them to benchmark their performance.
What’s in it for archives?
- Advocacy – evidence to make the case for your social and economic value in order to sustain investment
- Performance benchmarking – consistent data to compare your archives’ operational context
- Informing strategy – knowing your operational context will support your business planning
- Fundraising – the data can be used as evidence to support funding applications or to express your value with the public
The Process
Archive services will be invited to participate in the survey by email. The email will include a direct link to an online survey tool called SmartSurvey. You will be able to ‘save and continue’ the survey, which will allow you to save your survey response at any point while taking the survey. You can resume answering the survey at a later time.
We will provide the survey questions offline as soon as the survey is live, to assist you in preparing your return. You are welcome to refer to these offline to draft your answers, but please use the survey link to complete the survey if you are able to do so. If you have any accessibility needs and would like to submit your survey responses in a different format, please contact simon.mckeon@nationalarchives.gov.uk.
The guidance will help to provide added clarity on the terminology used within the survey questions.
If you require any further support, please contact simon.mckeon@nationalarchives.gov.uk.