Volunteering: Evolving in a digital world

In 2022-23 we delivered over 350 million records to our online users, and almost 475,000 original records to our reading rooms at Kew. Combining traditional volunteering activities with more virtual collaboration is at the heart of our new approach to engaging with volunteers.

We aim to:

• build and strengthen our relationships with communities and partnerships, while also reaching out to collaborate with a variety of audiences
• extend our services and develop new approaches for providing access to our services and information
• use collaborative digital channels, increasing the opportunities for users to interact with us
• contribute to future research by creating data that can be freely re-used under the terms of the Open Government Licence

Our commitment to provide an increasing number of our services in a digital format reflects the government’s commitment to make digital delivery the default for public service provision. We need to face the challenges, and ensure that we provide opportunities for those who have little or no experience of using digital resources, as well as those who do.