High quality collections management is the foundation to taking control of your archives and developing their use. Different advice and direction are needed depending on whether you are in the first stages of archiving a collection or need a review of an established service.

You may have no in-house expertise, an army of volunteers or an experienced team. I am experienced at supporting archive collections in all types of situations with a view to maximising the quality of their care and use to professional standards and best practice, such as those required under Archive Accreditation.

Recent projects

• Developing an operational model for an archive service that was being moved into a museum and moving all collections offsite.
• Delivering a 'Scoping Grant' review which resulted in a successful application to the 'Archives Revealed' Cataloguing Grants fund
• Advising a national professional membership organisation on developing its own archive, writing a collections development policy and brokering a deposit of the collection with a formal archive institution.
• Evaluating numerous potential sites to identify the best location for a new archive building.
• Developing a new tool to evaluate the impact on risk and access to collections for different onsite and off site storage scenarios as well as providing case studies and a UK-wide survey assessing the use of offsite storage.
• Providing numerous training courses on how to manage archive collections, project management and time management.

Services include:

• Establishing new archive collections with relevant strategies and policies
• Designing the operation and layout of an archive service
• Assessing cataloguing requirements and priorities with costed action plans
• Staffing and skills development including providing training, job descriptions and recruitment
• Reviewing existing archival operations to provide guidance and costed action plans
• Disaster management planning
• Analysis and planning for conservation
• Planning for digital preservation
• Developing access methods
• Integrating archives into other operations e.g. libraries, museums, commercial activity