Here in Victoria Tower we hold over four million historical records from the House of
Commons and the House of Lords. These records really lie at the heart of our
parliamentary democracy.
They've embodied our liberties, our rights and responsibilities for the past
500 years and include some of the most important constitutional records in the world.
We preserve all of Parliament's records in a wide variety of formats from the
earliest to the most modern, so that's everything from 15th century parchment rolls
to snapshots of our website. We ensure that Parliament's records can be preserved
whatever their format both for current and future generations.
Members of the public who want to see records in the Parliamentary Archives
search our online catalogue, they then email us a list of references of the documents
and make an appointment to come in on a particular day. We then fill out order
slips for each document and we go into the tower
every morning to retrieve the material and bring it down to our search room.
Our core staff look at all the order slips for the day and then figure out which
floors they need to go to in the tower so they can go and plan their journey
through the tower and get each batch of material accordingly.
They'll try and fetch out large items first and then add smaller items along the
way and try and avoid going to more floors than necessary.
There are always challenges. When they designed this building they didn't
design it with archives trolleys in mind. There are 12 floors which hold archive
material, about six miles of shelving, holding more than three million records,
going back more than 500 years.
The Victoria Tower was purpose-built designed as a record repository but it
wasn't designed to have 12 floors and it didn't have any lifts in it at first
and so the lifts had to be shoe horned in afterwards and they are very small.
We turn around about five and a half thousand enquiries a year, which equates to something like
about 16 a day. We people in the right direction so we can tell them if we've
got something or not or maybe we can supply them with a copy of a document
if they're interested in a specific item.
Most of the enquiries we get are by email, also people do ring us up and ask
us questions as well.
The people who can't come in to visit, we have a range of different online resources.
We do obviously have our online catalogue, which really
helps people a lot because they can identify material and then send us an
enquiry, maybe asking for a copy of something.
We have a public search room here, which is open from ten o'clock until four every weekday.
There's something like now about a thousand visits a year of people coming though.
When people come and call us up and ask to book an appointment what we try and
do is to find out exactly what they're interested in because obviously we have
to get material out of the repository and that takes us a bit of time.
Some people are academics who are looking at some of our political and
parliamentary collections, other people are really interested in things like
roads and railways because we have thousands of plans for that kind of thing here
and our staff are on standby to get them expert help and guidance.
We have about a thousand visitors a year who come on group visits to the
Parliamentary Archives. The idea is that they experience behind the scenes so they
don't just see the search room where people do their research but they get to go
inside the Victoria Tower.
We get groups of students, history students, or archive students, people with special interests,
we get groups of family historians, people coming who are interested in the history or the heritage
of the building. I find people are very, very excited about visiting the archives.
I've never yet had a person who wasn't excited by walking into the original
Act Room and finding himself surrounded by 60,000 parchment rolls.
We really want to make Parliament's records more accessible and to more people.
We want to make it as easy as possible for you to find the information
that you want and then to use it in a way that is most convenient and useful
to you, whether that's here in our public search room or online from anywhere in the world.
The story of Parliament is told through its records and we act as custodians of
those records on behalf of the British people and our role is to ensure that
that story can continue to be told and understood both now and in the future.