Research Service

Charges

Personal research rate: £24 per hour.
Business research rate: £48 per hour.

These charges include VAT plus postage (UK and Europe) or airmail postage (overseas, countries outside Europe). They also include the cost of any copies supplied (where relevant).

How the Paid Research Service works

• We will undertake up to one hour’s work before we request payment.
• If you do not wish to spend this much, please indicate how much money you are willing to spend on the initial enquiry. This can be anything between £12 and £24.
• Once work to the value requested has been completed, we will send you the results and a request for payment.
• If you wish to pay for a further enquiry, please contact us again after you have paid.
• If you would like to request an initial search longer than one hour, you will need to send payment in advance.

How to request research

Simply contact us by email or by post. Make sure that you:

• tell us exactly the information you wish to find out
• enclose any details that might help us
• include your full name, postal address, telephone number and email address
• enclose an accurate map if your enquiry concerns a house or land
• mention any previous correspondence with us related to your current enquiry.

Payment can be made

• By cheque, made payable to Bath and North East Somerset Council and in sterling currency. We do not accept Eurocheques and cannot accept payments in a currency other than sterling.

• By credit or debit card. We can take card payments by telephone, in person, or online.

Copyright

If we send you copies of documents, we may need to ask you to sign a form for copyright purposes: a form will be sent to you and it must be completed and returned to us with your payment.

Our commitment to you

• We will do our best to provide accurate and useful information, but there is no guarantee that relevant information will be found, and the Record Office cannot be held responsible for any mistakes in information supplied.
• Enquiries are dealt with as quickly as possible, but at busy times it may take a month for a full reply to be sent.

Your personal data

When you contact Bath Record Office: Archives and Local Studies by email or post to request research or make an enquiry, the Office collects and processes personal information such as name, contact details, and any information which you may give us, together with any information which we may give you in our response to your enquiry. We may also record such information in writing when you contact us by telephone. We process this information in accordance with the terms of the General Data Protection Regulations (article 6.1e) and the Data Protection Act 2018. Information you give us in enquiries and which we give you in our responses may occasionally include special categories of personal data. This is processed in accordance with article 9.2a of the General Data Protection Regulations.  Neither the personal information nor the special category information will be shared with any other body or individual without your specific consent or unless allowed by law. Research enquiries, whether by email, post or telephone are kept in hard-copy (not electronic) format for 10 years and under secure conditions. An electronic database which records only your name and the nature of your enquiry is kept on a secure server; the information is kept for 10 years and then deleted.

We look forward to hearing from you.