Parliamentary Archives Annual Review
2021-2022
The Longest Act: online and on tour!
All 348 metres of the Land Tax Commissioners Act 1821 went on loan to the Peoples History Museum from September – December 2021, where it was seen by over 13,600 people.
The loan was only possible due to the excellent work of our collection care team who assessed, treated and couriered the item.
The public services & outreach team managed the loan and worked closely with PHM to create an online video and outreach activities for local Manchester schools. Watch an evergreen version of the video on YouTube.
The imaging team had previously created high-quality digital surrogates of the Act which our digital preservation team have now ingested into the digital repository so that all 757 images can be viewed on our online catalogue. This was a process so big that it required the team to change and adapt the ingest.
Growing our Digital Collections
Our digital preservation team have added 150GB to our digital repository, in a variety of formats. This included routine ingests like our Questions and Answers API call, as well as legacy born-digital collections from the now-disbanded Energy and Climate Change Committee and ingesting some of the 27,580 images produced by our imaging team.
Getting ready to move
Our prepare & move project team and our preservation & access team continued to prepare the collections as part of the Archives Relocation Programme and completed four of its six planned collection moves to an offsite storage facility.
The team completed two key milestones for the project: they cleaned and packed over 32,000 Original Acts and catalogued 1,359 boxes that formed the cataloguing backlog. In addition, they commenced the auditing of 28,000 maps and plans and continued essential and critical cataloguing work in support of barcoding activities as well as packing collection items in varying sizes and formats in Victoria Tower.
The digital preservation team has begun auditing, condition checking and digitising our audio-visual records on various tape and film formats. This work will be essential in preparation for moving the collection out of the Victoria Tower, but will also allow us to provide increased public access to the small number of Parliamentary film and audio records we hold in the Archives.
Preserving the Collection
Our collection care team was nominated for the ‘Breaking New Ground’ House of Lords award. The team also increased the number of volunteers on their Introducing The Book-Trouser Project - Where there is a will there’s a way! (icon.org.uk) from 3 to 150.
The introduction of a digital request system has made it easier for the collection care team to track and report on conservation requests. They have completed 301 out of 343 requests across the Houses of Parliament. Each request varies in size from a handful of documents to thousands! They have treated individual works of art, and books and have initiated two major pilot conservation projects for treating collections with wax seals and deposited plans on tracing paper.
This year our digital preservation team and our information and records management service team have consolidated our approach to web archiving and updated the list of social media accounts we collect, and worked with our web archive partners to improve the way we present captured social media to our users
Valuing and Protecting our information
The Information and Records Management Service (IRMS) collaborated with other teams across Parliament to improve our approach to managing sensitive information, including an updated corporate risk for information across both Houses and a revised approach to Information Asset Registers (so we know what we have, where we have it and how it is controlled).
IRMS also made significant progress with updating the Authorised Retention and Disposal Policy (ARDP), Parliament’s policy for the retention and disposal of information. New policies for Security were introduced and Human Resources were significantly updated. A total of 52 changes were completed, and a further 101 were started.
This year IRMS answered 1,038 internal enquiries and delivered 157 requests to build new collaboration spaces in Microsoft365. Two new briefings for all staff on were developed and added to our training offering: Managing Email Effectively and the Parliamentary Protective Marking Scheme (PPMS).
The Information Strategy and Governance (ISG) team further developed the function of the Information Authority in the last year, focusing on improving our structure and relationship with the wider community of practitioners in Information, Data, and Cyber. ISG has been doing this through the development of the Information Authority Governance Review. ISG supported initial consultation on the report, through workshops and 1:1 consultation. The review recommendations were reported to the IA in March and were approved. In 2022/23 ISG will be developing a project plan and implementing these recommendations.
The team continue to support ongoing governance arrangements for the Restoration and Renewal Programme, with bi-annual meetings with R&R on their assurance statement and updates on the transition of the Sponsor Body.
After the approval of the Bicameral Information Risk by the Commons Executive Board and Management Board in late 2021, we have continued to report on the progress of its mitigation actions both to the IA and the Management Boards.
We have continued BAU arrangements with the Information Authority including introducing quarterly hybrid meetings and carrying out inductions, including that of a new co-chair and one new IA member.
We are open
A limited search room service resumed once Covid restrictions had sufficiently eased in June 2021 and we were able to provide researchers with in-person access to the collections for the first time since March 2020. Open initially just three days a week for a maximum of two visitors, we had by March 2022 increased our service offering to a maximum of three visitors, five days a week. The search room was fully booked 87% of the days it was open – demonstrating the strong demand for appointments post-lockdown.
Over 2600 records were produced for consultation in the search room. We introduced a new process for the retrieval and return of collections that have been sent offsite in preparation for the move.
Our enquiry service bounced back to pre-covid levels – we answered 5287 enquiries across the year. 22,551 images were created by the imaging team and sent by the public services and outreach team. The public services team also took part in the bi-annual national Archives & Records Association Distance Enquiry Survey. Our service continued to score very highly, with 88% of respondents rating the enquiry service as very good, above the national average.
“The quality of response I received was extremely professional and I was kept informed of progress all the way through from beginning to end.”
“Remote service during Covid restrictions is excellent. Very helpful staff. Consistently good service.”
Partnerships
The Parliamentary Archives continues to work with partners across heritage and academic organisations. We loaned five items from the Stow Hill Collection to the exhibition 'Uncommon Power: Lucy and Catherine Madox Brown' at the Watts Gallery in Surrey. They included a photo album and a palette used by Ford Madox Brown. The exhibition ran between September 2021 and February 2022, with more than 9,700 visitors.
We became a contributing partner to the project Hidden Treasures: Celebrating Jewish Archives in Britain, increasing awareness of our holdings relating to this minority group. We also became an official participant in the Beyond 2022 Project. This collaborative research project aims to create a virtual reconstruction of the Public Record Office of Ireland, which was destroyed in 1922.
We have partnered in research with York University and the University of Cambridge to analyse parchment records and the microbial legacy accumulated through its manufacture and use.
We co-created three YouTube videos with Royal Holloway on Coronation Banquets, Margaret Wintringham and Constance Markievicz.
We continued to work with Hand Of on the Lamplighters project exploring the history of Blyth and its unique place on the Northumbrian coast and used facsimiles of one of the beautiful plans from our collection and a Bill on the protection of sea birds as learning aids.
Our outreach team worked with Winchester School of Art graphic design students as they created art based on our collections.
Blogs and Online displays
We started using a new online storytelling platform for our online displays. We created our first online display ‘Spectacle & Ceremony: Westminster Hall and Coronation Banquets’. This was quickly followed by a second display ‘Parliament & the Falklands Conflict’. We also had another bumper year for our blogs with a total of 32,043 views and our most popular blog ‘Symbols of the UK and Elizabeth Tower’ with 3,473 views.
To learn more about our current plans follow us on Twitter and Facebook or email us at archives@parliament.uk
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