Summary

Description

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) records archive contains an estimated 1.2 million files in paper, microform and other formats. Most of these records are housed in a dedicated records management facility at FCO Hanslope Park. The archive is managed by the Archive Management Team (AMT). The function of the archive is to preserve records which are not in day-to-day business use by the FCO and which (following a selection process) may ultimately transfer to The National Archives (TNA). Around 50% of the records in the archive are FCO departmental or post files. Another 50% are FCO special collection archive files. These special collection records consist of around 600,000 files outside the FCO corporate file plan. The records relate to the work of the FCO and may have been created by the FCO or its predecessors (such as the Colonial Office) as well as by other organisations. In line with the recommendations of the Cary report into the colonial administration files, the FCO has recently completed a full inventory of its archive holdings. This detailed inventory is now available through the link below. The inventory was created for the FCO by a specialist external company and its primary purpose was to capture information about the special collections. These are the records covered in the most detail, including in many cases a summary of the content of the record series. However, FCO departmental and post archive record series are also listed. The linear meterage of each record series is an estimate based on the standard dimensions of archival boxes. The item count is also an estimate and is specific to the type of record. For instance a single map or a single paper file (which may contain around 100 pages) each count as one item. For microfilm, every sequence of one hundred images is counted as one item (by analogy with the size of a typical paper file) and it is assumed that each roll of microfilm contains a full set of images. The inventory linked below is a snapshot of a working tool which is continually being updated by the FCO’s Archive Management Team. We will periodically publish updated versions of the inventory.