Archive owners have become twitchy and wary

At present ‘all’ seem protective of their own elements of an archive and are not happy to share or combine. 

The larger museums and institutions have set the trend by charging for everything, forgetting that material originally supplied to them was free both of charge and limitation yet the archive take it as their own and refuse even to let the originator of the material see it without some sort of fee being imposed. 

Archive owners have become twitchy and wary of all so called ‘people showing interest!’ so as a community, sorry, but it does not exist in our experience. 

To compound this, one of our team visited a major contributor in Essex and an exchange of views took place, the outcome was: that Essex schools have become impossible to deal with, they will take anything on offer, money or material, but won’t reciprocate time or even feedback, so schools will lose out in the future. In terms of Essex projects, they have now changed their agenda and will now only look at intimately small areas and not larger as previously, so makes it important for the smaller projects to talk to them. Oh and they asked not to be named…just shows how bad things have become! 

The Big Society does not exist and those running it do not have a clue! In future for ‘Your Community archive’ to work it will have to offer free hosting and facilities so that small groups can test the ground without commitment. None of us ‘without funding’ can continue to pay huge hosting fees and site-names for on-line archives; ours will most likely close later this year!