Manual cataloguing costs £3–5 an item. There is now an alternative.

The Business Case

The cost of the alternative

A cataloguing backlog isn’t just an operational inconvenience. It’s a financial risk and a risk to the return on your digitisation investment — and the sector numbers are stark: around 13% of local-authority collections and over 20% of museum collections are uncatalogued, according to The National Archives’ sector survey.

In grant-funded projects, manual cataloguing works out at roughly £3–5 per item — a figure derived from Archives Revealed project outcomes. A qualified archivist costs around £36,000 a year (ARA 2026 guidance), before pension, NI, and overheads. At those rates, most backlogs will simply never be catalogued.

With Archivers.ai, cataloguing costs pennies per item or page — an order of magnitude cheaper than the manual equivalent. A 7,000-item backlog that represents around £28,000 of manual cataloguing time becomes a project a service budget can actually absorb.

This isn’t about reducing your team — it’s about capacity. The AI drafts; your archivists review and approve every record. The result is that material which would never otherwise be catalogued gets done, and the staff time saved goes back into your service, your public programmes, and your next funding application.

Board-Level Benefits

The case for your board

• Reduces backlog risk. Uncatalogued collections are an audit risk and a reputational liability. Archivers.ai turns backlogs into catalogued, searchable archives with archivist review at every step.
• Demonstrates stewardship. Standards-aligned cataloguing helps demonstrate proper care of your collection to funders, accreditation bodies, and the public.
• Outputs for funded digitisation. EAD3 and BagIt with PREMIS exports that help teams produce standards-aligned deliverables for funded digitisation projects and reporting.
• Retention after the project. Once the backlog is processed, staff Explore and a public discovery portal turn the work into long-term public value — the answer to “what happens after digitisation?”
• Works with your existing systems. AtoM, ArchivesSpace, Axiell, Modes, Adlib, Preservica, Archivematica — we do not replace your system of record.
• Predictable, transparent costs. Pricing is transparent and will be published when we launch, so the budget line is knowable — and defensible afterwards.
• EU-resident AI processing. A clear data-residency answer for your DPO, your auditors, and public-sector procurement.
• No new IT infrastructure. Runs in a web browser. No servers, no software licences, no forced migration.
• Scales with the collection. From a single box to a county-scale backlog — the same workflow, the same standards, the same review gate.
• Measurable output. Track items catalogued, time saved, backlog cleared, and (after processing) public engagement — clear metrics for board reporting.