The Business Archives Council offers a service to try and find good homes for business records which might otherwise have been destroyed. This usually involves matching up a suitable public repository willing to accept the records. The Council's archivist will set up an appointment to make a preliminary survey of your records. The amount, type and variety of records needs to be ascertained before they can be offered to a repository. A repository needs to know that the records are relevant to its own collection policy and that they can meet the demands on their time and space.
Most archive repositories maintain policies of free public access.
Any deposit of records can be made either as a gift or as a long-term loan, although most prefer the records to be gifted for simplicity's sake, avoiding ownership and copyright issues further down the line. The chances of a repository accepting a collection would be reduced considerably if certain choice items had previously been cherry picked by the company. They have to believe that it will add another dimension to existing collections and will provide an interest for researchers. Withholding items which are of interest and intellectual value to the company when the rest is being offered for deposit would also increase the likelihood that external researchers would contact the company itself for i nformation they cannot find at the repository where the records have been placed. This would increase the strain on a company's time and resources.