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Chief Executive and Keeper of The National Archives, Jeff James presented the National Theatre Archive with their accreditation certificate on Friday 2 February 2018, making them the 100th service to achieve Accreditation, and the first theatre.

On awarding the certificate, Jeff James said, “In assessing the National Theatre’s Archive, the Accreditation panel were hugely impressed by the archive’s considerable achievements and by how valued the archive is by the entire organisation.

“There is a clear contribution of archive service to the theatre’s overall mission to open up theatre-making and theatre-history to all.”

Officially the Royal National Theatre, (NT), it was founded in 1963 and based at the Old Vic theatre in Waterloo until 1976. The current building on the South Bank contains three theatres (Olivier, Lyttelton, and Dorfman).

Its archive covers the theatre’s period of operations from 1963 to the present day. In addition, it contains records detailing the movement to found a national theatre, with records dating back to the mid-19th century. The archive is both a specialist archive and a business archive, and has built a very high profile within the sector in the last few years.

The Archive is based at the NT Studio with Erin Lee as Head of Archive. It houses a research room, work areas and storage.  Onsite, the collections are accessible to all, through several “front of house” spaces in the theatre.

Archive Service Accreditation is the UK-wide standard for archive services, supported by a partnership of key professional archives bodies.  It is a national benchmark and quality standard. It recognises good performance across three important areas: organisational health, collections management and access.