Why Archiving should be in your School Budget for 2022

The yearly circus of planning and forecasting your school's budget is back in town. When it comes to this budgeting circus you can either be the ring leader or the clown.

A good budget improves your school in the areas which need improvement. It uses resources which are good value for money while also anticipating future costs. 

Your School’s archives take years to accumulate but can deteriorate quickly if poorly managed. Give your records the attention they deserve in this year’s budget.

Smart Stack has the archiving solutions that fit the bill.

Archives Are Your Legacy!

Schools don’t just produce educated pupils, they produce rich historical records along the way. These records are important for their own administrative and legal purposes. They also form the important historical fabric of your area.

Your archives are the legacy of your students, staff and school and need to be properly preserved and maintained.

Archive maintenance shouldn’t have to take a huge chunk of your budget. It can actually be extremely cost effective if they are maintained on a routine basis. However, if your archives fall at the wayside it can be a difficult (& costly!) process to bring them back up to scratch.

Archiving Essentials to Budget For

Quality Archive boxes

One of the biggest issues we find with poorly maintained archives are low quality boxes which quickly warp, crush, split or disintegrate within months of purchase.

These can quickly leave your records in a big mushy mess. Cheap boxes might seem like a good way to save money in your budget. You’ll only see them once every couple years right? Wrong.

Higher quality archive boxes or storage systems are guaranteed to save you grief and money in the long run. And they actually keep your records in the same condition you first stored them.

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Yearly Archiving Inspection

Now if your archives are well maintained a safety inspection of your archives could cost you nothing.

Whether you choose to undertake your own inspection or you choose to bring in a professional, an inspection will generally identify some areas which pose a risk and need attention.

These could be fairly minor fixes like broken lighting or resolving tripping hazards. Or they could require a little bit more attention such as an infestation of nasty mould or collapsing shelves. The inspection itself won’t cost you anything but should always budget for it’s recommendations. This is why we recommend regular inspections so you have an up to date understanding come budget time.

Archive rescues

Unfortunately not all archives are kept in a consistently maintained and safe state. In these situations you should budget for a professional archiving service.

Perhaps your archives have become disorganised after a period of neglect. You can bring in one of our archivists to get your archives back in order. Or perhaps install a brand new archiving system, or maybe you want to store them off-site and access them digitally.

These services will be a larger cost than continually maintaining your archives however you will generally only require one of these services. So budgeting for these costs in one year will mean lower costs in following years.

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Unforseen impacts

It’s hard to predict the future but we can always try and plan for the unexpected.

Perhaps your school is planning renovations, make sure to think about how it could affect access to your archives or even the archives themselves. Maybe you will need to move them to a different location.

With so many things to think about when it comes to budgeting it’s easy to get bogged down in the numbers.

We hope this article has given you some useful reminders and remember for all things archiving, get in touch with us.

Need Help With Your Archives? Get In Touch With Our Team!

We can book in a free on-site archiving assessment for you or meet with you to discuss your archiving needs.

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