Archives inventory

The Archives inventory started in early 2020 and forms part of the Archive Accreditation process.

Background and Archive Accreditation

Wellcome Collection applied to become an Accredited Archive Service over the summer of 2019. Our application was successful and we were awarded Accredited Status in November 2019.

Feedback from the panel noted that a long history of collecting and past practice has left some significant legacy issues, particularly around descriptive practice, and ensuring collections are effectively discoverable and accessible. We have one specific 'Required action' to address to meet accreditation requirements in future:

Progress the active work on improving collections information to ensure that all archives can be identified by researchers, balancing priorities of increasing access to backlog uncatalogued material and improving descriptions, addressing inclusive terminology and other key areas for development.

As part of the Accreditation review in March 2023, we outlined our progress since our initial application.

Note: only steps relating specifically to archives inventory are listed below:

• Ensuring that practice development is a core part of our approach, making iterative changes to policies, procedures and workflows.

• Ensuring that everything in the collection has a minimum viable description, either created on entry or during retrospective inventory or box listing.

• Running a series of 'sprint' weeks to bring all uncatalogued accessions to an agreed minimum box list standard. Batches of material are checked against existing documentation and new box lists compiled.

Other reasons for undertaking an archives inventory

• To provide us with a better overview and intellectual understanding of what we hold.

• To better feed into the cataloguing prioritisation workflow.

• To enable us to undertake basic sensitivity assessment of our collections prior to making them accessible via uncatalogued access requests.

• To enable us to meet sector standards and responsibly care for our born-digital material by identifying, extracting, ingesting and preserving all born-digital material held within uncatalogued collections.

• To enable us to extract and itemise vulnerable material to ensure long-term preservation e.g. audio-visual, fragile or oversize material.

• To improve the accuracy of information by rectifying and rationalising inconsistencies across existing documentation and CALM (our database for accessioning and cataloguing archive material).