Annual Reports Archive
At Newcastle University we have a large collection of historical annual reports of UK companies covering hundreds of companies, mostly commencing in 1968 and continuing unbroken to the present day. The current size is 110 linear metres but is, of course, growing all the time. We already have doctoral and postgraduate students using the collection and we hope to expand and improve access to it in due course.
As a resource for longitudinal reporting research, the archive is very useful and we hope to have future doctoral students using the archive for content analysis and discourse-based analyses of voluntary disclosures. In most cases, it is possible to chart 40 year trends in reporting patterns and this can yield exciting findings. Content analysis can generate very interesting and noteworthy graphs and the analysis of the way that communications have changed over time is also an interesting area of study.
