ABSTRACT
The Public Record Office Act 1838, which concludes the work of the Record Commission 1800-1837, led to the foundation of a national repository for the legal records of central government. For the following century there were few employment opportunities for archivists outside the Public Record Office (PRO), other than in the national libraries which employed manuscript curators, and staff at the PRO often regarded themselves as historians than as archivists. The PRO had limited official interest in or interaction with specialist and local archives throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century's: appointment of a Liaison Officer in 1964 improved official links. Expertise in preservation and description also developed among Historical Manuscripts (HMC) staff in the 1980s and 1990s. In April 2003 the HMC and PRO finally came together to form a new National Archives, under the guidance of a joint Advisory Council for National Archives and Records.
