Can you tell us a bit about your job and what it involves?

My job title is 'Inspecting Officer and Client Manager'. As an 'Inspecting Officer' I supervise and guide the records work done by several government departments, including GCHQ, the British Council, FCO, the Security Service, and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI5 and MI6). I make sure that they keep documents worthy of permanent preservation and throw away any documents that aren't once they are no longer of use.

The 'Client Manager' part of the job is the more outward looking aspect of the job, it involves engaging with other departments to advise them on their current electronic and paper records management.

What particular challenges does electronic record keeping pose?

When it comes to electronic records making sure significant records are preserved is the key. This is a difficult task, because one comes across a lot of data that looks very similar, and which may not look very remarkable, e.g. records of driving licenses, but as a whole, a collection of any such data can be of statistical interest.

Another challenge is the archiving of emails because they can involve a long complex chain of communication – a straightforward email asking a basic question can end up 20 emails later as the basis of a policy decision.

Technology can present us with a number of issues when preserving electronic records. An electronic file created on one type of hardware or software, may need to be converted into another format for long-term storage, which makes archiving it very hard.

What criteria do you apply when deciding if a document should be added to The National Archives?

All records created before 1660 must be kept. Nowadays for modern records acquisition and disposition policies are laid out by The National Archives guidelines. We in this department produce operational selection policies used by departments to guide their selection work. Before these are implemented the public are invited to have a look and say if the policy meets their needs and expectations or not, so it's a very open procedure.

The last selection policy I worked on was for records of overseas registration of births, deaths and marriages; this produced an enormous public response after it went out to public consultation, and the input from the public is now influencing the policy as it develops.

What's the most interesting or rare document you have handled belonging to The National Archives?

My personal interest is in bridges so my favourite document comes from the records of the Fulham Bridge Commissioners and Trustees. This body was set up under a very bizarre act of Parliament, listing the names of about 45 people and stating that they should meet in the Swan public house in Putney to finance and build a bridge between Fulham and Putney! It is perhaps unsurprising that the minutes degenerate as the meetings progressed!

The Corporation of London was strongly opposed to the construction of Fulham Bridge because at the time (1729) there wasn't a bridge over the Thames anywhere between London Bridge and Kingston Bridge and they feared that the new bridge would divert commerce away from the City of London. But the Bridge went ahead despite the obstacles placed by the Corporation of London and drunkenness, though it has since been replaced.

What are you working on at the moment?

At the moment I am working on the personal files of SOE (Special Operations Executive) agents from the Second World War. SOE agents parachuted into occupied Europe on covert missions. I am working through the files of about 1,200 agents so they can be released. But because they are personal files they can't be released while a former agent is still alive. The fate of many agents is unknown because they were simply unheard of after landing in the occupied territories; this complicates the task a good deal.

Finally, what do think will be achieved by the bringing together of the Historical Manuscripts Commission and the Public Record Office to form The National Archives?

It will mean a rounding out of the work my department does, currently the department focuses on just central government records, but our remit will cover a far wider and more general selection of records once we have become The National Archives.

However, I think the new name of The National Archives will give people a far better idea of what goes on here and I think the name is far closer to the public's perception of what we do than the current name.