We cannot write the history of Britain without recourse to the records of voluntary organisations. This will be especially true for those in the future wanting to understand social provision and policy as it operates today, given the increasingly blurred boundaries between public, private and voluntary sectors.
However, four persistent problems will make this harder than ever in the future:
- difficulties for voluntary organisations in knowing what to keep;
- a lack of resources in smaller organisations to maintain their older records properly;
- new challenges of preserving ‘born digital’ records such as emails and webpages;
- and inadequate legal protection for charity archives.
The Voluntary Action History Society has a long-standing interest in charity archives. In the 1990s it conducted a survey of larger voluntary organisations that revealed a wide range of problems facing charities in preserving archives and making these available for researchers. In 2011 we decided to launch a new campaign for charity archives.
In October 2011 the first meeting of a new action group was hosted by the British Library. The group brought together colleagues from national charities the Red Cross and the Children’s Society, trusts and foundations including The Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund and Barrow Cadbury Trust, together with academics, librarians and archivists from a range of bodies including the British Library, The National Archives, London School of Economics, British Records Association and the Charity Archives and Records Management group. We believe that by linking up researchers with archivists and voluntary sector organisations, we may be able to make a difference. You can read a report of this first meeting by Georgina Brewis and Brenda Weeden here ‘A New Campaign for Charity Archives’.
Since it began in the summer of 2011, the VAHS blog has featured numerous pieces on topics relating to archives. These have included working in the archives of small organisations and the impact of public spending cuts.
You can also hear a podcast the VAHS’s Georgina Brewis and Anjelica Finnegan outlining the case for charity archives at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in November 2011 as part of the ‘Enlivening Archives’ event.
We will be adding resources to this section in due course. For now you can find details of a number of archives on our links page, and if you would like to find out more about our campaing to save charity archives please email
