The ARA Survey results are here!

If you visited the Hull History Centre searchroom towards the end of 2024, you may have been asked to complete a survey about your visit to us. The Archives and Records Association, which runs the survey, has now released the results.  We’re delighted to see that the vast majority of our visitors were satisfied or very satisfied with their visit. We’re especially pleased that our staff scored 9.8 out of 10 for availability, attitude and appropriateness of their advice.

The results did suggest some areas where visitors think our services could be improved, as well. One concern for some visitors was the History Centre’s opening hours, which are shorter than they were before the pandemic. We are aware that the weekday hours don’t suit everyone, and so in November 2024 we began opening on Saturdays again for the first time since 2020 – hopefully this will allow some of those who don’t have free weekdays to visit us. You can check our full opening hours here.

We are open fewer hours than we were in February 2020, and this is based on user trends. Many of our researchers now prefer to order copies of documents to study remotely, a change which came with the pandemic and has not gone away. To balance the needs of our on-site and remote customers, and allow staff to carry out the vital behind-the-scenes work which keeps our service running, we can’t return to our pre-pandemic opening hours in the near future. But we do appreciate feedback on our hours and we take it into account in our future planning, so if you have comments for us please do send them via our feedback channels.

Another area for improvement is our online catalogue. Although 85% of users rated its usability as “Very good” or “Fairly good”, 15% of users found it “Poor” or “Very poor”. Our online catalogue is now ten years old and is feeling its age – in internet terms it’s quite ancient! We are pleased to report that we’ll soon be starting the process of updating our cataloguing systems, which will come with a new online catalogue. This will take a year or two to implement, but once it’s done it will deliver a great new interface for our archive catalogues. In the meantime, if you find it difficult to navigate our online catalogue you can always contact us for help.

The History Centre arcade - beautiful but hard to heat!

Finally, the building itself. As the survey took place at the end of the year, there were a few comments about the temperature of the arcade – it does get chilly in there in winter! The Centre’s striking translucent roof and glass-walled design unfortunately makes it hard to heat the arcade in the winter and cool it in the summer.

Thank you to everyone who completed a survey for us! We really appreciate everyone who took the time to do so.