Series details: CRDA/66

The Millennium Commission allocated over £1.3 billion in grants of up to 50% of the cost of over 200 projects on nearly 3,000 sites throughout the United Kingdom. Schemes ranged in size from such things as the Eden Project in Cornwall and the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff to small, community-based developments such as village halls and local parks.

The Grants Database was owned and transferred by the Millennium Commission. For further information on the history of the Millennium Commission, see the Administrative History of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS).

The Grants database PROFESA provides details of grants awarded to all the organisations supported through the Millennium Awards Scheme, which allowed individual people to benefit directly from a National Lottery grant; the Millennium Projects scheme; and the Millennium Festivals scheme. PROFESA contains basic information about all the awards, projects and festivals supported by the Millennium Commission, including applicant, project outline, cost, and progress.

The contents of the database were made available online. Users were able to make searches through the Millennium Commission website (http://www.millennium.gov.uk) and view summary details of projects, including images. These queries were sourced directly from the PROFESA database and its image library.

The content covers three main areas: Awards, Projects, and Festivals.

The Millennium Awards Scheme distributed small Lottery grants called Millennium Awards. Since 1996, these were awarded to individual people for projects which benefited themselves and their community.

Millennium Projects were the most visible part of the Commission's work, including large-scale buildings and environmental schemes accounting for over £1.3 billion of National Lottery money. The Millennium Commission only had enough funds to support a tenth of the applications it received. The Commission's contribution represented up to 50% of the cost of each project and the balance had to be raised by the projects. At the time of completion, there were over 215 Millennium Projects on around 3,000 sites throughout the United Kingdom.

Millennium Festivals 1999-2001: The Millennium Commission wanted to help communities celebrate the new millennium. Working with other Lottery distributors it created a Millennium Festival fund of over £100 million. The year 2000 saw over 2,000 Millennium Commission funded festivals taking place. An impact study on the Millennium Festival carried out in 2001 highlighted the positive impact of the Millennium Festival in the United Kingdom. (See Publications produced by researchers).

For further details of the content of this dataset, see Links to dataset catalogues.

The National Archives have selected for permanent preservation the "final form of [the] whole database, in order to document [the] full range of [the] Commission's funding activities."

The Millennium Commission was wound up on 30th November 2006. No further accruals of the data are expected.

The Millennium Commission Grants Database and related dataset documentation are public records under the Public Records Acts, 1958 and 1967. The National Archives has assigned the dataset and documentation the series reference MM4.

The Grants Database is open, with the exception of certain contact fields (for example names and addresses) which may represent a data protection risk if exposed. These fields are closed for 86 years under Section 40 (Personal Information) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

Certain sections of the Dataset Documentation have been redacted by NDAD, or closed for the same data protection reason as above. See the Dataset Documentation Catalogue for further details.

The language of the materials is English.

Related dataset documentation has been transferred to NDAD. See the Dataset Documentation Catalogue, reference CRDA/66/DD.

Two related datasets held at NDAD are the National Lottery Awards Database, Series CRDA/39; and the Millennium Commission Awards Scheme Database (AMIS), Series CRDA/65.

The National Archives holds records of the Millennium Commission in series MM, including Minutes and papers from 1994 in MM1; a copy of the website in MM2; and case files from 1993 in MM5.

The National Archives has taken an archive snapshot of the Millennium Commission website (http://www.millennium.gov.uk), since other Millennium Commission material was transferred to TNA prior to the ending of the Commission in November 2006. The website snapshot is available via the UK Web Archiving Consortium, reference PI 15128.

The Millennium Commission produced numerous publications about their work, currently (as at April 2007) held online at http://www.millennium.gov.uk/about/publications.html. Their collection includes, for example: impact studies; the Commission's annual reports; and copies of Starpeople Magazine (which profiles some of the projects Millennium Award winners have achieved).

See the Millennium Festival Impact Study, by Jura Consultants and Gardiner & Theobald, June 2001. This study highlighted the positive impact of the Millennium Festival in the United Kingdom. Copy of the report downloadable at http://www.millennium.gov.uk/publications/festivals_impact_study.pdf, consulted 14 September 2006.

The client hardware was Dell Optiplex; the server hardware was Dell Power Edge.

Client Server Environment: Client: Dell Optiplex running MS Windows 2000 Professional. Server: Dell Power Edge running MS Windows 2000. The system comprised four modules:

1. The Client module containing the operating system design
2. The Server module containing data files
3. The Reporter module used to run reports and queries
4. The Reporter_Server containing reports and queries available to users

PROFESA was a relational database system. The core data was held in the table MAIN which contained a single record format for all record types. Any parent type could generate child records. Parent and child records were contained in the same table, differentiated by the field MAINid. 47 secondary data tables, supported by 14 link files, comprised the remaining structure.

For further details, see Links to dataset catalogues.

Data was originally entered and updated by Millennium Commission staff. Each user of the system was assigned a profile which determined which of the three sections of the system they could access (Awards, Festivals or Projects), and whether their access was read-only or update. All facilities were accessed through a single main switchboard screen. Further details on data management are available in the PROFESA User Manuals, of which NDAD hold numerous drafts and versions in a discrete subseries of documents (see the Dataset Documentation Catalogue, reference CRDA/66/DD/1).

Data owner states: "The quality and completeness of data obtained/obtainable was generally poor and would have failed the input validation and prevented registration. Most of the formal verification of input was therefore removed at the users' request." 1

Dataset catalogues provide more detailed information about individual datasets, and are currently available for the following dataset(s):

1. Data Owner Dataset Transfer Form, received by NDAD 20/10/2006.