 Good afternoon. This is just really a rapid introduction to the subject. It's an attempt to contextualise the campaign to put into contextffof following papers we have gathered together. And to summarise the situation from the UK. One of the positive things I think it may be positive, Ieithi, mae'n ymhlwg yn rhaid i ddargarau a'r gwybod i'r cymhwynd i'r newid, a'r cymhwynd i'r cymhwynd i'r newid, i gael eu rhagl. Ond y fwrdd yn fynd yn ymlaen, mae'r allan â phobl yn yr UK, yr allan arno'r unig, mae'n angen yn ymlaen i'r gwybod. Rydyn ni wedi bod yn gweithio'n dweud. nhw'n defnyddio'r peth, mae'n brawy, mae hynny yn gobeithio ystanc. Dyma yn hynny mae hynny mae dyma'r hynny o'r brwyng mae'r ddechrau. Dwi'n meddwl i'r cyhoflwyso cyntaf y sydd haydwg aeth gwahanol arloedwg dyn nhw ym wneud, rym ni'n ysgolwch, y dylai'r farchif, yr ysgolwch, y dylai'r farchif. A'r oeddiad o'r ysgolwch ar gyfer sy'n hoffio ynglyn â'r farchif ar gyfer ysgolwch ar gyfer ysgolwch. Rwy'n meddwl i'r ysgolwch, rydyn ni'n meddwl i'r argyfuddol biologic, oherwydd mae'n meddwl i'r ysgolwch ar gyfer y Gwyrraeth EAC. yng nghymru o'r fforddau EAC. Rwy'n gweithio'r urll. Rwy'n gweithio'r web o'r corffau ar y Llywodraeth Argyllustol. Yn ystod, mae'n mynd i ddefnyddio ar unrhyw arddai argynwyr ar gyfer yr argyngyrch ar gyfer yr argyngyrch ar gyfer yr argyngyrch ar gyfnod. Mae'n mynd i'n mynd i ddefnyddio ar gyfnod. On that basis, Historic England have funded the Society for Museum Archeology to conduct three consecutive annual surveys of museum collecting in England to find out how many museums have archaeology collections, how many of them are still collecting archaeological archives to add to those collections and how many of them are going to be doing that in the future. The idea is to see if the numbers over three consecutive years would change and we can see that in 2016 154 museums curate archaeological archives and those 119 are still collecting. Further 60, so 35 have stopped, further 61 reckon that they will run out of space in their collection stores within the next five years, so that's by 2021 now and a further 60 in under 10 years. So by 2027 112 museums out of 154 will have no space left to collect archaeological material from archaeological projects, but worse than that they may have to stop collecting because they will not have the opportunity to create more space. So if that's the situation and this was a survey conducted in 2012 there were an estimated 9000 archaeological archives from separate individual projects that could not be deposited because the museums that would normally collect that material had stopped collecting. So that was six years ago you could probably double that number now. That's what we've been calling for some years a crisis and as somebody pointed out if it's a crisis why hasn't it got worse? Is it still a crisis or has it got beyond crisis? Well some museums are still collecting but there is still a serious issue. So people have suggested that there are two beyond actually creating new stores which is something that museums cannot find the resources to do currently. There are two suggested approaches to addressing this issue. One is for museums to create space in their stores by rationalising their collections by retrospectively applying current standards of collecting to older archives. So where projects in the 70s and 80s collected material such as stone or industrial waste that may now be less likely to be collected they could go back and reduce the space by reducing the quantity of those materials in their stores. And then looking ahead to apply a more rigorous selection strategy to projects in the future so that when museums were offered archaeological material they could be certain that it merited long term curation. So being more selective about what is being collected and that's really the subject of this session. So very soon and probably the next four weeks the Society for Museums of Biology in the UK who were commissioned by Historic England to bring together guidance on rationalisation will produce their document which is based on five scoping studies carried out by five separate museums in England who looked at how they would set about rationalising their archaeology collections and creating space by reducing the quantity of material. This is the structure of the guidance. The idea is that those scoping studies would feed into guidance for other museums to follow if they wanted to carry out rationalisation. The results of those five scoping studies the overwhelming result is that rationalisation is not worth the resources you would have to put into it. The level of recording that would need to be carried out on material in archaeology stores is so high that it's labour intensive that no museum could currently afford it and it's highly likely that no funding agency would give them the money to do that. One of the museums Suffolk County Council in the east of England worked out. They graded their collections by those in red that are good candidates for disposal to those that are medium candidates. They calculated that in order to create a maximum of 2,892 box spaces in their store the resources required to do that they could build a new store three times bigger than the one they've already got. For them there was no point in carrying out the rationalisation exercise. This is good news because it means that when people go to a museum and say why don't you throw away some of the stuff you've already got and make space for some more they can use these case studies to answer that question. All the museums agreed that actually carrying out the project helped them to know more about their collections and give them an opportunity to promote them further and make them more accessible and bring more people in to use them. That would help to answer the issue of why we're actually bothering to store this stuff. The second project, the selection toolkit, Historic England have funded the Partlodge Collarchy's Special Interest Group of the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists in the UK to put together a toolkit to enable more people to use them. People can use to set out and develop a selection strategy as part of an archaeological project. The template that accompanies that toolkit is designed to lead people through the course of a project, from project planning to archive deposition and take them through the selection process. And what issues need to be resolved at what point of the project by which members of the project team. So there is no doubt about what people should be doing when. And selection is not something that you do at the end, that's the point. You begin with a broad selection strategy that is structured around the end of the project and then you review it as the project progresses. As you recover material from the ground, as you complete your surveys, as you answer the aims of the project, those aims might change. And so your selection strategy should. And it's formulated around the contents of an archaeological archive. The digital components, documentary components and the material components, the finds. And shows people how they might lay out an approach to determining for individual types of finds, how you should go about selection. The final project I just want to quickly talk about is a review of the standard of reporting on archaeological artefacts in England. I did talk about this last year, at EAA, some of you might remember. This basically developed criteria for establishing what the good finds report should contain. It conducted a survey of grey literature, so digitally available site reports and finds reports in project reports. And it reported on the general findings of how many of those reports actually met the criteria. So the criteria were intended to sort of score the quality of finds reports. And it's based on the premise that a finds report should characterise the objects in question, should quantify them to allow analysis and comparative analysis. And it should interpret those results in relation to other finds and to the projects on the site. And those are some of the questions. There were 40 criteria and these are the results. So none of the reports met 100% of the criteria. We wouldn't really expect that. But 43% met less than 75% of the criteria. And 38% met less than 50%. That's not good. In fact, some of them met less than 25%. The question then is, and these are some of the comments. Object dimensions are not consistently included. If you have an assemblage of pins, you'd expect their dimensions to be presented. Quantifications are not always standardised. There are many, many problems with it. And you can look it up yourself if you follow that URL. Only seven of those reports include any scientific analysis. And although that's not always applicable, it sort of indicates really that certainly in commercial archaeology the use of scientific techniques is underrepresented in terms of finds research. So the question from that really is, if we're going to be more selective about what we retain in archaeological archives, how can we do that securely if we don't know what it is we're not keeping? If the standard of analysis and reporting is not good enough, then we don't have a basis from which to develop selection strategies or protocols. So how do we improve our standards? And how do we encourage people properly to record their material and to prepare archives in a way that enables selection to take place? Where do specialists fit into this process? A lot of specialists I speak to would not deselect anything. They'd want to keep every single animal bone or shed a pottery or fragment of building material. That's not really helpful, but they need to be part of the process. And then to address the theme of the conference, can scientific applications help us to be more securely developing selection processes and informing the process of formulating and transferring archaeological archives? Thank you.