Swindon Museum and Art Gallery has successfully won a tender to deliver a Historic England project examining the sustainability of archaeological archives in museum stores.
The £20,000 will be used to provide a comprehensive survey of the charges required by museums for the transfer of developer funded archaeological archives, explore how these charges have been set and how the income is used by museums.
Archaeological archives consist of records and finds made during an archaeological project. The documentary archive includes written records, drawings, photographs and digital data and the material archive includes artefacts such as pottery and metalwork, or environmental remains such as animal bone. These archives are deposited with an appropriate museum, and made accessible for further research.
Currently museums independently decide their own fees and the project seeks to understand the different costs that museums take into account when setting these with an aim is to feed into a wider conversation about the long-term sustainability of archaeological archives in England. The tender was awarded to Swindon Museum and Art Gallery, due to the expertise of the staff team and gives us the opportunity to shape the conversation around this issue.
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