Setting up an in-house Archive
Sources of Funding
Imperial Russian Treasury Bill. Image courtesy of The Baring Archive.
Tax incentives
The Inland Revenue has issued a statement of practice making it clear that companies can include the care and conservation of their business archives, and the cost of providing access to them, in their costs before the calculation of corporation tax. This has now been reflected in Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs’ Guidance note BIM42501 - Specific deductions: administration: business archives. For more information see the HMRC website at http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/manuals/bimmanual/BIM42501.htm
Independent grants and charitable trust funding
Most grants to catalogue, preserve and exploit archive collections are targeted at public sector collections but there is growing collaboration between private and public sector archives which is unlocking some of these grants for private business archives. Business archives donated to public sector record offices are of course eligible for grants.
The Heritage Lottery Fund
Since 1994, the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) has awarded
£151m to 466projects in archives with 55 awards totalling
around £21m in the last financial year. Recent examples of
business archives projects include Documenting the Workshop of the
World, Pay and Power, The Works, Yorkshire Made, and Made in
Suffolk. HLF grants are awarded to predominantly public sector
institutions (including community archives), but are available to
private sector archives working in collaboration with public sector
partners to create a resource with demonstrable public benefit. For
information about the HLF, contact the Heritage Lottery Fund
Advisor at The National Archives:
louise.ray@nationalarchives.gsi.gov.uk
The National Cataloguing Grants Programme for Archives
This is a source of funding for business records collections deposited with publicly-funded repositories. The scheme is currently funded by a consortium of charities including The Pilgrim Trust, Foyle Foundation and Wolfson Foundation (and administered by The National Archives) and has secured £1.3m in project funding for archive cataloguing over the next 5 years. While grants are usually given for cataloguing archive collections per se (at an annual award round), it is acceptable to apply to finish cataloguing a collection that is already partially listed. For more information please contact Melinda Haunton at The National Archives.
melinda.haunton@nationalarchives.gsi.gov.uk
PRISM fund
The Fund for the PReservation of Industrial and Scientific Material (PRISM Fund) supports the acquisition and/or conservation of any object or group of objects illustrating the history of any branch of science, industry or technology. The fund is allocated £250,000 p.a. and is administered by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council [MLA]. The PRISM Fund covers England and Wales.
Arts and Humanities Research Council
To access this funding stream you should work with academics – usually economic or business historians - whose research interests tie in with your business sector. For example, part of an academic’s AHRC bid could include the partial cataloguing of your collection (which makes the sources available for research) but this cannot be the primary purpose of the bid, only an additional output from a research-based project. There is no formal process for finding an appropriate academic, but universities have management and history schools that employ business historians and Glasgow University and London School of Economics, in particular, have specialist business history units. Alternatively contact the Business Archives Council or the Association of Business Historians for advice.
For more information about grant-awarding organisations and
processes see
The National Archives website at
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/archives/grant_aid.htm