The marketing context. Outreach: luxury or necessity?1

Abstract

Most archive services now undertake outreach work of some kind. This can vary from a leaflet describing opening times and basic services to organizing major promotional events or the production of a website. An increasing number of regional and national initiatives, usually linked to funding sources, also require repositories to work more closely with their users and to address emerging issues, including social inclusion and ‘learning and access’. The resulting projects will often involve outreach work at some level or another. This article, based on a paper presented by the author to the Society of Archivists' 2003 conference at Southampton, asks if outreach work is fundamental to our services or whether it is an unnecessary drain on budgets and staff time. It also considers how we can use marketing techniques to assess the value of outreach for both our present and future service developments.

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