Records in the Future Carryl Allardice, Head of Knowledge and Information Management Team
In looking at records in the future I plan to:
touch on the origins of FCO’s record keeping, paint a picture of what current records management looks like in the FCO, look at what we are working towards in terms of future records management and examine the challenges historians and researchers may face when they access FCO’s electronic records at The National Archives in the future.
Why we value record keeping in the Foreign Office The Foreign Office record keeping goes back to 1800 when the decision was taken to poach Richard Ancell from the State Papers Office to be its first Librarian and Keeper of Printed Papers. He started work on 1 January 1801. The State Papers Office was primarily responsible for registering and taking care of government records. This was the time of the enlightenment, the age of reason, when governments throughout Europe sought to subject administration to rational principles. So the establishment in 1782 of a separate government department, the Foreign Office, to handle foreign affairs was an obvious example of how such principles were put into practice. Another was the decision of Lord Grenville, who was Foreign Secretary from 1791-1801, “to create within the Foreign Office a department solely responsible for organising and retaining its records”1. It was a move of remarkable bureaucratic innovation, as the Foreign Office decided it would keep its own records instead of sending them to the State Papers Office, and it was Richard Ancell’s responsibility to organise these papers. Along with the King’s messengers, who fell within the ambit of his control, Ancell ensured that Foreign Office information was not only well organised, but it was also distributed globally. As Keith Hamilton one of our Historians has said: “Ancell’s appointment marked the beginning of a knowledge management revolution”2 in the Foreign Office. In order to facilitate access the Foreign Office’s papers, Ancell compiled a two volume compendium of diplomatic records entitled A Collection of Printed Treaties, Conventions and other State Papers between Great Britain and Foreign Powers. The volumes organised the documents in order of Countries and Dates, with a Table of Contents arranged in geographical and chronological order, were completed in 1802. This two volume work which we still have in 1
2
Keith Hamilton, “Richard Ancell, 1755-1844”. Talk given in the FCO, October 2005. Ibid.
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