In April of this year John Walford, Head of Modern Records at the PRO, gave a paper to the SCOLMA AGM on the preliminary findings of an investigation of the Zanzibar Archives covering their content and condition and proposals for their preservation. The essence of those proposals was a training/salvage workshop programme, which was carried out in Zanzibar from late July through August. The workshops were hosted by the Zanzibar Government and sponsored by the Commonwealth Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust and commercial firms in Tanzania, the UK, Kenya and Germany.

The programme comprised three concurrent workshops: Paper Conservation, Arrangement and Description of Documents and Archives Administration and Records Management. Each aimed to review or teach the fundamental procedures in its field, to provide practical supervised experience in dealing with real record problems and to achieve as much basic work on the records themselves as possible.