The Catholic Archives Society is working in partnership with several other interested organisations to develop a national strategy for Catholic archives in England and Wales. The objective is to establish a network for sharing advice and information about the care and use of Catholic archives in accordance with the Society’s aims of encouraging responsible archive management and making the archives as widely available as possible. This will include information about the location of archives and potential places of deposit as well as promoting best practice relating to collecting policies, terms of donation and deposit, access, and conservation. An important strand of this work is the identification of archives which may be at risk, perhaps because the organisation which created them has not the resources to care for them or is closing down, and to advise about possible places where they can be preserved and made available.
Good progress has been made since the strategy working group was set up in 2013: advice leaflets and sample policies relating to aspects of the preservation and administration of archives are available on this website and some collections of archives have been transferred to appropriate repositories. Much work remains to be done. Progress reports have appeared in CAS Bulletins and in Catholic Archives no.35 (2015).
For further information about the strategy please contact the chair of the working group, Judith Smeaton judith.smeaton@btinternet.com
catholicarchivesociety.org 