Federation Of Family History Societies

Changes to services at The National Archives (TNA)

We have today received from Jenny Cottle, Senior Brand Manager, The National Archives the following details of the changes being made at Kew.

1. From 4 January 2010 our reading rooms will be open five days a week (Tuesday to Saturday), with longer opening on the days we are open. From 5 January 2010, our opening and document ordering times will be as shown in the table below.

 

	Opening times	Document ordering times
Monday	Closed	n/a
Tuesday	09:00 – 19:00	09:00 – 17:00
Wednesday	09:00 – 17:00	09:00 – 16:15
Thursday	09:00 – 19:00	09:00 – 17:00
Friday	09:00 – 17:00	09:00 – 16:15
Saturday	09:00 – 17:00	09:00 – 16:15
Sunday	Closed	n/a

 

We recognise that this change may inconvenience some of our visitors, but our research shows less than 0.5% of our readers use our facilities for six consecutive days a week. We are committed to and will continue to support high quality scholarly research at our facilities in Kew, including services for the academic community.

2. A charge will be introduced for use of our public car park. From April 2010, there will be a charge of £5 per day and discounted annual tickets will be available (savings will be dependent on the emissions level of the car).. In addition we will be allocating a limited number of free tickets to regular unpaid volunteers, who are making a significant contribution on key projects.
3. We will move some more of our microfilm and microfiche records to storage at the end of this year, providing primary access in our reading rooms through digital means. This is part of a ongoing programme that has been running for several years to replace film and fiche with digital images. We will continue to work with our commercial partners to ensure even higher levels of accuracy of the indexing information provided. For those who need to see the microform it will still be available, on request.
4. We will also ensure our records experts are available to our visitors when they are most needed.  Following consultation we will continue to provide expert advice in the Map and Large Document reading room for all the hours we are open. Elsewhere records expertise will be focused on busier periods of the day, when it is most needed.
5. We will be introducing the new streamlined online record copying service in late 2009/early 2010. This will help simplify the current online and telephone ordering processes.

Further information can be found at www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/changes.

Roger Lewry
FFHS Archives Liaison

28 September 2009