That sounds like an opportunity to ask some penetrating questions. I have every sympathy for the staff because they are probably trying to do this task with staffing levels much reduced from say ten years ago. There would not be sufficient bodies to keep a "reading room" open and also do the removal.
This is evident everywhere across archives, libraries, museums, regimental museums, historic environment records. The solution seems to be to merge them in one building. Then, to keep the doors open, staff have to stand-in for colleagues expert in different disciplines . Mistakes are made, an acquaintance suffered one example just after covid, when museum staff involved themselves with an archive deposit. All these services are at the thin end of reduced local government funding when major statutory services have had their slice. Some of these services are statutory, but in varying ways.
Museums are not. My local regimental museum used to receive funding equivalent to one member of staff which was cut by the MoD about 25 years ago. Archives have responsibilities to different bodies for various classes of records: diocesan, manorial, local health and court records, pre-1974 local authorities. That is just to look after them, not to make them available 5 or 6 days a week. Public libraries have a statutory responsibility to provide "an adequate service". Around 1990 this was eventually defined in detail, and then rapidly watered down. A local studies library closed for any extended period is not an adequate service, but it seems to have become acceptable.
Smaller numbers of staff now have to spend part of their time writing bids for money for specific projects, in order to survive. There is no spare money for new microfilm readers, parts for the old ones become a problem. One archive service was reduced to asking its "Friends" group to fund the purchase of acid-free archive storage boxes, which are not cheap, but should be a standard stationery item.
An election is looming, all these matters are out of sight when canvassing begins and nobody is seriously interested.
