Surveys Show the Way: How Surveys are Helping the UK Parliamentary Archives Prepare to Move

ABSTRACT This article describes a high-level survey carried out during eight weeks in 2018, in the context of a move for the Parliamentary Archives (London, UK). While both the location and the moving date were unknown at the time, the Conservation team undertook a number of surveys that provided an important data set on which to base the planning and decision making for collection risk management, preservation and conservation. A number of benefits derived from the survey are presented here. They included: the identification of repackaging requirements prior to a move, the uncovering of unknown or lost items, improvements to staff’s collection knowledge, the reassurance that the staff know what the collection holds, the development of fast statistics such as the collection’s oldest item, largest item and number of boxes holding the collection, the documentation of conservation requirements, the identification of cataloguing requirements, and team-building. Results and lessons learnt are also discussed in this paper.