Threatened by funding cuts to local libraries and archives

The current trend in the present financial climate is to seek a reduction in funding by the Government and Local Councils to establishments such as Libraries, County Archives and other archive holding bodies and replacing it with volunteer led organization input or support under the umbrella of the “Big Society”. 

This raises a number of issues affecting small history and community groups such as ours. With the reduction in subsidy to these bodies staff cuts usually follow which result in the loss of valuable knowledge of archive material and although well meaning volunteers are drafted in as replacements they do not have the knowledge of the archive material held, as the digitization of archives has either been slowed or cancelled. This has happened in the Local Studies section of our Central Library over a short period to a detrimental effect to the service. 

Additionally due to the cost cutting exercise in County Archives additional or increased charges for photocopying and photographing may/have been made to cover losses and small local history groups such as ours cannot absorb these increases in research with the limited funding from membership fees. 

The challenge of the “Big Society” concept is to maintain the expertise and knowledge in the Libraries, Museums and Regional Archives with no or minimum cost to groups such as ours. Large voluntary organizations in the the local history sector may be offered funding to compensate for this but I think it is unlikely that smaller groups will be considered. If this happens then a number of small community or history groups will not survive resulting in the loss of valuable local knowledge. 

There may be opportunities for larger national voluntary history societies or organizations , with additional funding to plug these gaps to a certain extent but for the majority of small local history or community groups this will be impossible as most of them survive with a core “active” membership numbering in single figures.