Sarah Tyacke talks to Elspeth Hyams about the creation of Britain’s truly state-of-the-art National Archives
In November 2004, when the BBC broadcast Who Do You Think You Are?, its series of programmes in which 10 celebrities explored their family history, hits on the National Archives (NA) website more than doubled to 5m. ‘It was just phenomenal,’ says Sarah Tyacke, NA Chief Executive. ‘It had a ripple effect across the archives in the country, so we are now bound up in popular consciousness with individual and popular history.’
The NA worked with the BBC for more than a year before. That they could cater so well for the explosion in popular interest in genealogy and history was no accident. Even when the then Public Record Office (PRO) was still at its old site in Chancery Lane, back in 1995, Sarah was talking about ‘a rapid shift from paper to electronic media’. In fact, it was then that the PRO set up the first cross-government e-advisory programme on the born-digital record.
They went on thinking, because things were changing all round. ‘What happens is that it opens your mind to all sorts of other changes. If you are moving [the eventual relocation to Kew in west London was being planned], and then you do the Family Record Centre, you begin to look at the electronic revolution. We looked out and saw Compuserv and Roots across the water in the US, and realised what we were in for, that we really needed to do something about it. E-access then took off.’ It was a moment of revelation – ‘almost like a road to Damascus’.
Ten years ago, the archives world, unlike the library world, did not have a digital catalogue. What the PRO had was 167 km of records, which needed to get online. In 1997-98 the PRO established the Archives Direct 2001 programme for its catalogue, which accomplished its task a year early, by 2000. ‘By that time, we were well and truly in the business of looking across the rest of the country, and we then began the Access to Archives programme (A2A).’ What that meant was that the PRO’s central team brought together marked-up catalogues, got them digitised, and sent them back to their original local repositories, while building the A2A database. That now has some 8.1m records, and there had been 16m downloads from it by July 2005, which demonstrates the size of the undertaking but also how useful it has been. As Sarah points out, ‘It’s obvious what we needed to do, but it’s one thing to know and another thing to do it.’
The programme to make archives accessible, Access to Archives, was ambitious. ‘The PRO put in a bid to the Treasury every year, but something as big as this involved partners – the British Library, the Historical Manuscripts Commission and the National Council on Archives (NCA).’ They applied to the Treasury for an invest-to-save grant, and negotiated with the Heritage Lottery Fund to ensure its trustees were content to receive applications for funding from individual archives to get their catalogues retrospectively converted. The scheme was ‘immensely successful, and even the Treasury was good enough to say it was the most effective way of cataloguing or converting the country’s archives. If each one had tried to do it by themselves, either they wouldn’t have done it, or it would have been more expensive for each local authority.’ Success was due to a combination of effort from the PRO, and regional and local archive services. ‘If you can convince the Treasury that what you have done is effective, I think that is a pretty good mark of doing a good job.’
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Sarah Tyacke got into archives very early in life, as a teenager. In those days the Essex Record Office had a specialist dedicated to education, a person whose job was to encourage students from schools to use the record office and the archives. ‘From the age of 15, I was let loose on the archives. It brought me into contact with the owners of properties, who I went to see because their properties featured in the archives. My first little mini dissertation was on pre-union workhouses, which makes me sound a terrible bluestocking. It was a good excuse to get on my bike and ride around the Essex countryside. In a sense I was always interested in history and documents and then, of course, maps. My real specialism is the history of cartography and travel. I have a rather eclectic series of interests, and museums, libraries and archives are absolutely perfect for them.
‘I did a history degree at Bedford College (University of London). Then I went straight to the British Museum in 1968. I learned my trade as a curator. When we became the British Library, we became oriented much more towards the information rather than artefacts – a good developmental area for me. That led to consideration of how libraries are actually run, which led me into administrative work: looking at cost savings, and effective ways of preserving materials. In those days, digital was not thought of. People were keen on all sorts of other methods. I did quite a lot of what you might call library administration and then in the mid-80s I took over special collections in the British Library, which was everything that wasn’t a book. I applied for my current job – then called Keeper of Public Records – in 1991.’
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Transformational leader
It is probably Sarah Tyacke’s ability to see the big picture and think and act strategically that makes her the transformational leader she has been. Critically, she was the right person, in the right place, at the right time. She joined the PRO from the British Library in 1991, bringing with her not only skills as a curator (her specialism is the history of cartography and travel) but also experience of a strategic review of service – having undertaken, in 1985-86, a scrutiny of the BL’s arrangements and procedures for preservation on behalf of the Cabinet Office’s Efficiency Unit. The PRO too had had a scrutiny, the methodology of which was quite familiar. Some quite sweeping changes were proposed and her first challenge was to manage the PRO’s move to Kew. She had not expected to become a builder (having been only recently involved with the plans for the new BL) but found that she rather relished the task.
Anyone who has ever been involved with the relocation of a national institution will recognise at this point that it is not only a building project that is undertaken, but management of its anxious clientele. There was considerable pressure from ‘interested parties, especially those in the east of England’ not to move. That presented an opportunity in disguise to consult with the user community. Resolution of conflict was achieved by ‘lateral decisions’, at the time much more revolutionary than that now sounds. In the early 1990s, institutions like the PRO ‘were still very supplier-driven, and to get what you wanted you had to belong to the inner circle’.
Family Record Centre
A compromise was reached with the family historians and the east Englanders. ‘We set up the Family Record Centre in north London for the family historians, which still runs and is very popular, with microfilms and, nowadays, online and CD-Rom services.’ It was a partnership with the Office for National Statistics, which holds data on births, marriages and deaths, and is an example, she says, of the way you can accommodate your clients, the readers: ‘You just think about it from their perspective. You can’t always do what they want, but in my view it’s one of the first criteria for anyone who runs public services in libraries, archives or museums to think about. It’s common sense, but you’d be surprised!’
Sarah has ‘always been against privilege for the few’ and in favour of enabling all those who want to read – in this case, documents – being encouraged to do so. It is probably, she says, because her parents were teachers, and because, having learned her trade as a curator, she is ‘naturally inclined to education and interpretive skills, through exhibitions and that sort of thing’. You need to have those skills to make the documents or the books or the objects mean something to those who are coming to study them, and online technology has been particularly helpful in bringing together the activities of museums, libraries and archives. They cover everything: the world, the local, the individual and the personal, the historic, the geographic’. And, thanks to the digital revolution, what was previously the preserve of the few – often the privileged few – can be enjoyed by all. That, she says, ‘has been one of the most amazing and valuable changes in the last decade. Long may it continue’.
The opportunities presented by digitisation have brought about the transformation of the service over time. The National Archives, set up officially in 2003 when the PRO and Historical Manuscripts Commission (HMC) moved to Kew, has a prize-winning website (www.nationalarchives.gov.uk) with an architecture that allows the NA to cater perfectly for the popular and the professional, providing learning resources for schools, universities and the public, as well as material of interest to archivists themselves. It is no longer necessary for ‘an increasingly national (and international) community of historians, archivists, genealogists and other users’ to travel to Kew.
The website has already been through several revisions, with its online catalogues and help screens now so useful that they have received rapturous praise from the public. As a portal, it provides access not only to catalogues but also to a growing wealth of resources digitised for the site, including census data. Following the success with the 1901 census service and its Documents Online service, in December 2004, the NA launched, in partnership with ancestry.co.uk , fully searchable indexes and scans of original documents from the 1881 and 1891 census for England and Wales. They were closely followed by the census for 1871 in March 2005 – the first time the complete censuses for England and Wales have been available in this way, or published consecutively. It is now possible to trace a particular person or family or locality through time.
For the academic sector the National Archives is working with partners such as Jisc (Joint Information Systems Committee) for the HE community, and the Arts & Humanities Research Council, the Economic & Social Research Council and the Heritage Lottery Fund. Four advisory panels of eminent British and American scholars support the work, advising on publishing strategy for everything from traditional hard copy to electronic material, including cataloguing and digitisation projects.
For schools, there is now a widely respected specialist resource, the award-winning Learning Curve website. Page impressions increased this year by almost 6.9m, and the number of users rose by 36 per cent, to just over 800,000. A staggering 19,000 other websites link to it directly. It is also hosted by the South East Grid for Learning, and is freely available for schools there to access its materials via a high-speed connection. In fact, the NA is ‘the first organisation in the cultural sector to offer this service’. It includes, for example, pages from the Domesday book. Resources are tailored for key stages in the national curriculum. ‘It is one of the best online teaching services for history. It has won countless awards and, obviously, it backs up our own educational service.’
For pupils, students and members of the public, the NA also offers study workshops and master classes, which can be delivered using video-conferencing facilities – just part of an extensive educational programme enabling more and more people to use and enjoy the National Archives, including people who ‘perhaps wouldn’t dream of coming to archives’. In fact, says Sarah, ‘given what we hold here, the necessity to assist the teaching of history in schools seems to me axiomatic’. Local authorities used to have educationalists attached, but that has declined considerably over the last few years. She hopes that ‘in the future something can be done, perhaps with the assistance of the Museums, Libraries & Archives Council, to improve the position of documentary heritage and help schoolchildren understand their own local histories and national histories.’
For all the delights of opening up access for educational purposes, the National Archives, of course, has not lost its primary function, as keeper of the government’s records. But electronic documents have brought new challenges of storage, cataloguing and preservation. If documents and records in this environment are not managed properly, the new Freedom of Information regime, introduced in January this year, is dead in the water. The whole approach has changed.
‘The old PRO was set up to make sure the public saw that record after 30 years. That work continues, but there are countless archives across the country which the old HMC used to report on. Bringing the two together seemed very sensible – it would be ridiculous to continue with fragmentation and silo mentalities. I think we were fortunate we realised that early on. In many ways, it was the possibilities of the technology that enabled us to think so laterally.’
Digital records
‘Where we do have a real responsibility,’ Sarah says, ‘is, obviously, the e-record – the born-digital record, and the subsequent preservation of that.’ It has occupied them for 10 years. It is not something that can just be left – which is why the NA set up the Digital Archive, which won a prize in 2004 for innovation. But that achievement cannot lead to complacency. ‘I wouldn’t underestimate the challenge. The e-record is the record now – there isn’t another. The paper is just a print-out you take to meetings. The record is in the system, and the system tells you the who, why, what and when, provides the context that makes a record in our sense.’ The change that creating records in this way represents, she says, is profound and will take – is taking – a generation to come through. ‘We have done a great deal of work on digital records. We have made some steady progress. I wouldn’t say we understand everything about them, but we are learning by doing, rather than theorising, and that’s the only way to proceed.’
When an individual is creating a digital record they have to think about it as they start. ‘You can make that as easy as possible, and one does prompt, but the individual feels as if they are having to do more than they would, creating a paper document.’ This is only because, she thinks, ‘people are so used to doing a paper document that it doesn’t appear to be a burden’. This is an important theme, about to be tackled at a big conference in Budapest in October, dedicated to management of the document life-cycle (DLM Forum). This international meeting will also consider a revision of the first Model Requirement of e-Records (‘MoReq’) so that ‘countries across Europe can benefit from the latest thinking, rather than having to reinvent the wheel’.
Sarah chairs the DLM Forum of European archives and associated e-record system suppliers, which is working on the revision. It is, she says, a sensible approach: ‘We are also part of the EU community, and we need to combine with our colleagues there to improve matters, which is why we helped with the European Union report on archives, which is to come out shortly.’ The international element, working in collaboration with other governments, adds another dimension to the NA’s remit.
But the NA is still involved in a traditional archival role, selecting material, ordering it and preserving it. Electronic preservation has, to an extent, made ‘weeding’ easier, but when significant material is selected, it can no more be dealt with automatically than it could before. ‘If the material is coming from the higher echelons of government, or is about policy issues, or events in the past generally regarded by politicians, civil servants and contemporary historians as being of significance, you are still going to deal with it on a case-by-case basis.’ Only for less significant material are retention schedules and disposal much easier in the electronic domain. And technology ought to make dealing with volumes of material much easier.
The NA has taken a strong proactive approach in all this. ‘If you look at the website, you will see new appraisal policies, custodial policies to do with digital records held in departments, and operational selection policies for records – a full suite of advice for the digital age on records keeping.’ This guidance should make a difference to anyone dealing with records, especially a public authority. The advice is certainly necessary because, in addition to dealing with a new technology and medium for presenting and storing records, there is another significant element – the new information framework and working practice required to service Freedom of Information.
Freedom of Information
‘Under the Act, there is a code of practice for record keeping – Section 46 – which covers all FOI bodies. It’s not law, but it is advisory, and certainly the Information Commissioner would assume that public authorities would be following that code.’ Preparing for implementation has dominated the last couple of years. It brought an unexpectedly high number of enquiries in January to the National Archives, well over 1,200, but more than 99 per cent of them were dealt with in the required timescale, ‘proving the rigour of our carefully planned new procedures’.
The NA has advised all government departments on the management of electronic records. Nearly half have now installed electronic records management systems to meet the needs of their own particular business. Most of the others expect to have completed the process by the end of 2005-06. That means that ‘we are well on the way to safeguarding and preserving the public record in whatever electronic form it takes, and future access to our national history through digital records is being assured’.
There is now a ‘seamless flow’ programme, designed to manage the semi-current records in individual organisations, and enable them to be transferred as automatically as possible to the National Archives’ digital archive. And, as Sarah points out, while the volume of work on the digital record has increased enormously, work with paper records has not diminished – both are dealt with simultaneously.
This year’s Annual Report – only the second for the NA – is Sarah’s last after nearly 14 years of service with public records. The report is well worth reading for its historical perspective, as well as its clarity of vision and precision of purpose. In her Chief Executive’s report, Sarah outlines many important developments over the years, not just the move, the establishment of the Family Record Centre and the creation of a new national service to replace the much more restricted functions of the old PRO and the HMC, but the successful improvement of public services and expertise through, and in response to, the enormous changes brought by ICT and digitisation.
The changes have been engineered with an unequivocal commitment to excellence (‘That’s really important, because you can’t let a public body be second class’) and uncompromising ambition (‘To be recognised as the best national archive in the world, highly regarded for the excellence of its services and its professional advice about every aspect of record keeping and preservation’). At a time of almost unprecedented technical and cultural change, leadership has been consistent throughout the process.
A decade ago, likely outcomes were far from apparent. In 1995, she asked a senior colleague of hers ‘What are we going to do about the electronic record?’ His reply – extraordinary though it now seems – was ‘I wouldn’t worry, Sarah, we’ve got paper for the next 30 years.’
In that context, her ability to see the mass market potential and adapt strategy to take it into account seems all the more remarkable. ‘We just changed. We said: “Right, we have to get these catalogues online, we have to do it all as fast as we can.” And where we could find additional funds through consortium activity, we went for that. We also recognised internally we would have to support central teams to do the work.’
Though the National Archives continues to cater well for traditional users, the service to a new public is evolving. I think we have discovered how to segment: we look at schoolchildren, further education, higher education, postgraduate researchers, we look at anybody who wants to come, whether online or offline, to see the material, and we try very hard to accommodate them all. We have learned a great deal about partnerships with the commercial sector. It is a totally different world, and we are a totally different organisation, but we retain the right values.
‘It’s the record that counts. It’s the record that gives the evidence and, while post-modernism has given us great insights, it is for us to make quite sure that we can say the record is authentic and reliable. It is for us to be the guardians of the record, as we always have been.’
Sarah Tyacke CB is Chief Executive of the National Archives (formerly Chief Executive and Keeper of Public Records at the Public Record Office) and, since 2003, the Historical Manuscripts Commission. She retires at the end of September.
Updated: 20 September 2005