UK’s National Archives has embarked on an ambitious and successful programme to digitise the most popular documents in our largely paper-based collection, making these available from anywhere across the globe through instant digital access. We are aiming to digitise over 100 million pages by 2012, which range from iconic documents of such as the Domesday Book, through to the hugely popular census records and government legislation. From a zero base in 2001, almost 10 million National Archives records were downloaded in the month of August 2008. We have used a range of approaches to achieve this strategic goal including: Government funded approaches, Partnership with academic/ other government institutions and Licensing agreements with commercial third-parties. This programme supports our obligation to make records available to the public, but more than that, it represents explicitly the three strands of our vision. First, we guarantee the survival of our documents, and this is key to our efforts to protect them. Second, the programme brings history to life for everyone, as they trace their own family history, and understand better the social context of their ancestors’ lives. Third, it demonstrates our role in leading, transforming and innovating in the management of government information.

Policy Context

The Public Record Office Act of 1838 was the first legislation to protect the records by creating an official archive. By the time of the 1958 act, responsibility for record preservation rested with departments and the Public Records Office (now the National Archives) was made formally responsible for the guidance, coordination and supervision of these processes. Initially, records in the PRO were to be opened to general public inspection when they were 50 years old, unless special considerations dictated a different period of closure. With the 1967 Act, the period of closure narrowed to 30 years. However, the Freedom of Information Act of 2000 replaced those parts of the Public Records Act that related to access to records under FOI request. As such, the National Archives record set continues to grow at an extremely fast rate, and the legislative framework encourages this. We are the third largest government department in terms of FOI requests. At the same time, digitisation is not explicitly required, but simply accessibility. As such, the National Archives’ vision and strategic direction is, however, explicit – we intend to make as much of the records available as possible online, based on funding and public demand.

Description of target users and groups

The National Archives' role is making information accessible to the widest audience possible, from a school child writing an essay through to a retiree researching their family tree. That's a key element of our Vision: making public sector information truly accessible and bringing history to life for everyone. Our audience is the entire UK public who use information every day of their lives: searching for information about their ancestors, researching local schools and tracking historical references online. The National Archives has a key role in preserving and promoting this public information, opening it up to the widest possible audience.

Description of the way to implement the initiative

Demand for instant online access to information is increasing, but in any period of tight resources we have to prioritise and digitising is very expensive - we estimate that the cost of digitising all of our holdings would be in excess of £4 billion! Over the past five years The National Archives has been working with trusted partners in the private sector to make records available for research. Under this model, our commercial partners manage the financial risks, whilst we retain all intellectual property rights in the digital images. Royalty income is returned to The National Archives, enabling us to plough money back into developing new services and satisfy customers at minimal cost to the taxpayer. This strategy is focused on delivering the digitisation of our largely paper based collection, in a way that sensibly prioritises projects based on cost versus public benefit. As such, the innovations that have delivered this range, pace and breadth of digitisation includes: -Public/private licensing agreements that represent best practice in the industry -OCR and scanning methodologies that have led to 5 million documents being scanned ahead of schedule, and at lower cost -Additional server capacity to deal with critical document releases -“Your Archives” to enable the public to contribute their comments directly to records

Technology solution

Our digitisation programmes combine state of the art OCR and scanning programmes, in some cases using highly innovative conservation and analytical techniques. Our licensing partners already provide mash-up technology, combining, for example, census information with google maps. Technology choice: Standards-based technology, Mainly (or only) open standards, Open source software

Main results, benefits and impacts

Innovative technology and creative use of commercial partnerships is driving our successful digitisation programme forward largely without additional cost to the taxpayer - users can download a census record for a charge which is considerably less than if we had to cover digitisation costs ourselves from the public. Achieving this largely through commercial partnerships has generated a real market momentum. We are using the commercial partnership model to digitise the huge 1911 census, as part of our aim of digitising 100 million pages by 2012. This is the most ambitious digitisation programme we know of, estimated to be a saving of £48m to the taxpayer, when compared to the cost of carrying out digitisation ourselves. And for records not already digitised, our "digitisation on demand" service allows a customer to order the catalogue record online for a fee, which merely covers our costs, making the service self-financing and so, economically practical and sustainable. No other archive anywhere in the world is anywhere close to our achievements: for every document requested in our Kew reading rooms,, over 100 are downloaded online. Impressively, over 66 million documents from The National Archives' collection were downloaded last year, from a zero base just over 7 years ago. Virtually everything we have in our collection can be requested digitally. If a document is not already digitised, a digital copy can be requested (and provided within 24 hours) via our "digitisation on demand" service. Our aim to be able to provide any document in our collection through this service. And it's not just history we are bringing to life - our work in improving and enhancing access to the Government's online legislation service ( http://www.opsi.gov.uk/legislation/) is now enabling access to current material as well as historical material in quick and user-friendly ways.

Return on investment

Return on investment: Not applicable / Not available

Track record of sharing

Last year, the National Archives won a major grant from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), the UK funding council devoted to supporting pioneering information technology programmes in education, to fund a 2-year project. "British Governance in the 20th Century" will deliver online resources for researchers, students and teachers illustrating how British governments dealt with the major events of the twentieth Century. We have worked closely with JISC to digitise over 500,000 papers from the UK Cabinet, including its minutes and memoranda from the First World War to the late 1970s. These collections, covering both peace and wartime, are a fascinating record of government in the 20th century. Users can browse the archive regardless of location or time, with metadata-enriched search facilities, opening up research opportunities that paper- and microfilm-based search aids cannot deliver.

Lessons learnt

Lesson 1 - Making them robust in term of 'future proofing' in terms of format etc Lesson 2 - Ensuring there is a proper preservation policy in place Lesson 3 - Maximising the benefits of OCR technology Lesson 4 - The programme encourages competition and innovation and the development of cutting edge services, precludes monopolistic exploitation and drives down costs for end users. Scope: International