A Visit to the BT Archives
I popped into the BT Archives yesterday, to be shown around by their head archivist, David Hay. In a non-descript building in Holborn, BT employs three archivists, David and a museum curator, and spends about £2 million a year keeping its archives going. There is still a business case for them, in terms of marketing and in potential legal disputes, but it is also part of their corporate social responsibility. (Although I was sad to leanr that BT closed their museum during the dot com crash, and dispersed the collection, albeit to five national museums.) I looked up my dad in old phone books, and was also astonished to come across my grandfather, a barge builder in East London. Looking at their names in the phone book, it was almost as if they were alive again. A year ago, I would have had to have come into the building to do that. Today, I can download these pages from the web. Archives are far more accessible, and asa result far more sexy. There has been a proposal to give businesses tax breaks for maintaining their archives, but it has been resolutely ignored by the Government. We will have to look at it.
Tizzy said on February 7th, 2008 at 4:46 pm:
Damn good idea, there, Ed. However, these would mainly apply to the big businesses of today - how would you encourage the small and emerging businesses of tomorrow? Perhaps that could best be done by the local councils, who could give deduct costs from our business tax.
There was a great deal of archive activity, at the local level, for the millenium but now nothing. I do like sites such as http://www.headington.org.uk/oxon/high/index.htm that have bothered to trace some of the history of the main streets of Oxford.