Introduction

In his essay ‘The Strange Death of Municipal England’, Tom Crewe presents some sobering facts. Between 2008 and 2018, local authority spending in the UK has been squeezed by 37%, and a further substantial reduction is scheduled up to 2023. For many local councils this will mean the loss of more than 60% of income by 2020 (Crewe, 2016). Further retrenchment of already pinched resources will inevitably focus resources on essential front-line services. Crewe presents a carefully argued narrative based on compelling evidence. The experience in the UK is replicated in many other countries that have large budget deficits in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

The consequences of increasing digital access

Financial retrenchment in the public sector is just one factor impacting on the sector, which is witnessing a decline in staffing and supposed ‘efficiencies’ to be gained through mergers with other cultural heritage services, such as libraries and museums. The sector has to compete for the ‘leisure pound’ and the increasingly vast amount of heritage assets available on the web, which will continue radically to change how collections are accessed and used by a diverse community of users. In the wake of the digital abundance, new forms of content are added daily, from a variety of sources (Zephoria Digital Marketing, 2019); for example, five new Facebook profiles are added every second, creating new pipelines of content for researchers and immersive experiences hitherto unimaginable. In the analogue world historical newspapers were rarely used, but now that they have been digitised and are fully searchable, they are heavily exploited and provide an increasingly alternative channel to the use of archives, at least in the modern period. While this evolving digital offer is to be applauded for giving greater access to collections, there are inevitably unintended consequences. Worryingly, there has been a decline of 3%, over the period 2015–2017 in numbers of on-site visitors to archives, largely from the 65–74 year age group. Although a good deal of the most commonly used digitised content is sheltered behind the paywalls of third-party providers, a similar reduction in online access to collections through archive and library websites has been reported by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (2017).