DORSET History Centre may need to find more than £3million for an extension – or face running out of storage space within two years.

Extra documents and artefacts from councils which will close for business in April will add to the problem.

The county’s Joint Archives Service (JAS) which covers the whole of Dorset, is now deciding if it should apply for a Heritage Lottery Grant, after being rejected in December 2017, or rent out of county specialist storage for items it cannot look after.

A report to an advisory panel next week (Jan 24) recommends that building a two storey extension at the centre in Dorchester, over the existing car park, would be the most cost-effective option, if it can be funded.

The centre was built in 1991 with an anticipated 25-year expansion space but the repositories are now approaching capacity with around 2 years’ remaining space for archives.

The volume of material held at capacity, of around 1200 cubic metres, will be approximately three times that quantity of material that was held when DHC first opened 25 years ago.

The building capacity has been put at around 45,000 boxes and the service currently receives around 1000 boxes of new material annually. In the coming year that is likely to increase as district and borough councils close for business to be replaced by the county’s two new unitary authorities.

If the expansion option at Dorchester can be funded it would provide 25-30 years’ space and would potentially have enough room for all the remaining paper and parchment archives likely to be acquired by the service.

The only viable alternative to the extension proposal would be to look at a third party specialist storage supplier to meet future needs. At present the only providers are located in Cheshire and Oxfordshire with the likely cost of adopting this solution would be up to £10 million over the 60 year (full-life equivalent) of the extension.

It is believed the service could find more than £1.3 million from local funding. But assuming it could attract a maximum Heritage Lottery Fund grant of £900,000 the project would still be more than £900,000 short of the total it expects to need.

The report says that the local service is one of the cheapest to run in the country – costing each person in Bournemouth, Dorset and Poole 72 pence per year. The service has almost half the staff it had in 2006.

Budget proposals for the coming year anticipate a standstill figure of around £550,800.

More than £200,000 has been set aside for building improvements in the next twelve months, making the building more energy efficient – essentially by reducing air travel through the walls, better insulation and to provide very limited heating and air exchange. This will mean that much of the current mechanical plant servicing the repositories, now over 25 years old, can be decommissioned.

The works are likely to start in March.