We are proud to announce that the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh Archives are officially now an Accredited Archive Service – a result of many years of hard work and improvements across our Preserved Collections at the Garden, but what is Archive Service Accreditation and how did we get to this stage?

It’s 25 years since I began working in the Library at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. I started as a Library Administrative Assistant, but my interest in history led me to get more and more involved in enquiries that required delving into the ‘Archives’; at that point a basement room filled with boxes arranged in alphabetical order by name and subject. It was understood that having someone to further develop and curate this collection would be desirable, and so I undertook further training at the University of Dundee to become the Garden’s first qualified archivist in 2010. Being a lone archivist with an uncatalogued collection and a fledgling service, we looked towards services like the Archives Hub for guidance around cataloguing and the National Archives’ Archive Service Accreditation for a vision of what we were aiming for.

What is Archive Service Accreditation?
Archive Service Accreditation is based around a nationally agreed Standard defining good practice around how an Archives service is managed, and how it looks after its collections and users. Services can benchmark themselves against it, the emphasis being on an encouragement to continually improve ourselves, our collections, our facilities, and how we do what we do. It’s possible to look at the Standard and aim towards being better at what we do, but there comes a point when it feels like a logical step to actually apply, and last year we felt we had finally reached that point, the recent lockdown having given us a chance to work on a lot of catalogue and policy creation and improvements.

Organisational Health
This section looks at how the Archives fits into the organisational structure of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh; how our staff and finances are managed; how we strategise, plan and report on our activities; and the physical spaces we store the Archives collection in.

Collections
This section looks at how we record information about our Archives Collection; our Policies, Plans and Procedures; how we catalogue our collections and to what extent they’re catalogued; and how we care for and preserve the documents and items we’re responsible for.

The Stakeholder Experience
This section looks at the people who use our collections; do we understand them; how well do we communicate with them; and how accessible our collections and buildings are.

Next steps – the Assessor visit
Once the application was complete, reviewed and finalised (70 pages long, not including the numerous supplementary documents!), we submitted all of the paperwork in December 2024. We were quickly informed that our Assessor visit would be in February 2025. This involves two assessors from the Scheme’s supporting bodies; the National Records of Scotland and the Scottish Council on Archives, in our case accompanied by a ‘shadow’ – a representative from the National Library of Scotland intending to volunteer to become an assessor in the future; to spend a day with us; going over the application, viewing our facilities and storage spaces and spending time talking to us about what we do. We looked forward to the visit with a mixture of nerves and anticipation – we wanted to do well, but the overwhelming feeling was that we do enjoy talking about our collections, about what we do, alongside showing people what we have, so we hoped it would be enjoyable, and it certainly proved to be so, although I think everyone was exhausted by the end of the day! We were very impressed by how knowledgeable, informed and thorough the assessors were.

The assessors report back to a panel who make the final decision about whether to award Accreditation or not. In our case, we were awarded Accreditation with provisions that we will need to work on immediately in order to receive full Accreditation. At the same time, we have been given a number of improvement measures that we can focus on in order to develop and grow, and that we will need to demonstrate progress on in order to maintain our status as an Accredited Archive Service in six years time; these mainly revolve around our ability to house a growing collection and to make improved provisions for digital archiving.

All in all, the process has been incredible useful, informative and helpful. It has allowed us to gauge how far we have come in providing an Archives service for the staff, students and visitors to the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. It has brought the Preserved Collections team closer together whilst allowing us to think and plan on a wider scale; but most of all, it is a constructive and encouraging process, centered around acknowledging progress made, whilst encouraging further expansion and improvement across all areas of our service.