ARHIVSKI VJESNIK 42. (ZAGREB, 1999.)

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P. Cadell, Financing of archives, Arh. vjesn., god. 42(1999), str. 93-102 UK on the part of central government to place too many obligations on its local equivalent, and while I have some limited authority aver what happens to local archives, I cannot set them up, nor can I enforce any standards upon them. I certainly cannot suggest an appropriate level of funding. As I said earlier Scotland was a country which tended to centralise archive services. This was the case until the 1970s when local authorities began, quite properly, to establish their own archives. However they did so independently of the central service, and though they were expected to "make proper arrangements" for their archives, the standard for these arrangements was never specified, nor of course was the level of funding that they should receive. You may feel that I have said enough to indicate that we can learn little from each other in the area of funding archive services beyond noting the almost infinite number of different ways of doing things. This is probably so at the moment. Indeed one of the things I have noted since the very earliest days of my involvement with the ICA is that the best wecan do is to appreciate that there are indeed other ways of doing things, and that the system under which we as individuals are obliged to work is not the only one that functions effectively. However I believe that we could perhaps learn from each other if we were sure that we were all meaning things in exactly the same way. We have all had to make some calculation for example of the cost of supplying a page of photocopy or a frame of microfilm. We calculate this on all, or some of the actual costs involved - finding the item in the catalogue, withdrawing it from the shelf and returning it, the costs of machinery and paper for the photocopying process, the cost of billing etc. Do we charge for general over heads, for accommodation, preservation, for cataloguing? When we have to justify the costs of the archive service, have we ever stopped to consider how much the service costs per user? Who is a user? Is he someone who comes into an archive, and perhaps decides that he is in the wrong place? Does he come to see an exhibition; does he come with a group; does he come, get a reader's ticket and consult a catalogue; does he come, get a ticket, consult a catalogue and then order out a file and read it; does he make contact by letter, e-mail or telephone and need an answer; does he come from some part of government, in short who is the user of an archive, how do we define him, and how do we calculate how much he costs every time he contact with us? How do we compile statistics of use? When an item is taken off the shelf, do we count only an item for an actual reader, or do we include those for staff use, but possibly for a photocopy ordered by letter, for administrative use, or for conservation? When we measure the time that certain activities take, do we start when the letter was written or when it was received, when the order for the item, was placed or when processing began? How do we calculate our conservation statistics? Clearly it 100