The National Archives

Standards

Our aim is to offer advice and guidance on the creation, management, care and use of records. To support this advice we promote standards, and have published the National Archives Standard for record repositories to guide our own advisory and inspection services. The Standard is the recognised benchmark on caring for records and providing access to them.

The Standard's recommendations are addressed to archivists and governing bodies of record offices, libraries, museums and other institutions holding records which are available to the public for research. Equally it is applicable to all custodians of archives, both public and private, who are seeking to improve conditions of storage and access and/or aspire to meet The National Archives Standard.

The National Archives offers a free independent assessment of the extent to which a repository has achieved the recommendations of the Standard. In cases when repositories meet the Standard, and have in place a satisfactory long term strategy for the care of and access to the archives in its custody, we will award The National Archive Approval. For further information about this service see our leaflet:

Inspection services for archive repositories(55kb)

To ensure that it is of value to all practitioners in the sector the Standard is supported by the Framework of Standards which comprises a range of standards and best practice guidelines in all aspects of record keeping. The Framework was developed following a consultation exercise (320kb) in November 2003. This consultation period ended in February 2004, and a brief summary of responses (31kb) and action points were published. All responses were considered and were extremely helpful in steering the development of the new National Archives Standard for record repositories and the Framework of Standards.

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