The National Archives publishes a new online strategy

2 Jul 2008 02:46 PM

Provide and Enable: The National Archives' Online Strategy sets out how we will respond to changes affecting the organisation's online services over the next three years. Changes will be driven by our Vision, as well as wider social and technical developments.

The new online strategy heralds an exciting new era for The National Archives. In future we will deal with an ever-growing number of digital records - records we need to preserve and make available in a fast-changing online world.

A new family of websites

The National Archives website will be restructured into a 'family' of websites, to reflect the organisation's different functions and meet changing customer needs. A team is working across the organisation to develop the new websites, and to ensure there is minimum disruption to services and all links are redirected from the old to the new location.

The web of data

Provide and Enable embraces the way the Internet is moving from being a web of separate documents and becoming more of a web of data. The impact on the online future of The National Archives is enormous - we will need to make more of our information searchable and available for re-use.

We are already opening up our data, through projects exploring new technologies like RDFa in the Gazettes and in our partnerships with commercial organisations. Provide and Enable gives us a foundation to do even more.

Understanding our customers

At the National Archives, we recognise that we need to find better ways to understand our customers and meet their needs, whilst continuing to deliver a world-renowned, authoritative service to Government and the general public with limited resources.

Archives are complicated: we plan to consolidate and reshape our advice and guidance to provide more help where it is needed. Our customers also want a two-way conversation with us and we will explore the opportunities, opening up in areas such as social networking.

Driving the changes

Provide and Enable sets out a decision-making framework for The National Archives' online services, embodied in ten Principles that will underpin all our online work and four Agendas directing the internal changes we need to make to become an online organisation.

For more information see Provide and Enable: The National Archives' Online Strategy. This document is in PDF format, but an HTML version will be published in mid-July.