ABSTRACT
No aspect of service in British Archival Collections can be properly considered without reference to the historical treatment of Archives in Britain and the development of the profession of the archivist. 1 As recently as 1948 the great luminary among British archivists, Sir Hilary Jenkinson, entitled his introductory lecture to a new course in archive administration at University College, London, The English Archivist: A New Profession. Yet in the same lecture he observed that “we began to awake to the profit of exploiting old documents for the correction or enlargement of our ideas upon points of history and antiquities so early as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.” 2 Dugdale and Rymer are familiar names in university libraries with a decidedly archival as well as distinctly historical background. Magna carta itself might convey the impression that the archival function is anything but new. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that in Britain the profession of archivist, if not the practice, is very much a post-Second World War creation.
