Data Mapping Project

The NSBAS Implementation Group are pleased to announce that the Archives and Records Association have approved a grant from their research and advocacy fund for a Data Mapping Project in Scotland.

The data mapping project aims to create a single consistent and clarified dataset for business archive collections in Scotland that will provide improved and flexible information for creators, custodians and users of business archives.

It will do this by locating and mapping business archive collections and collecting policies in Scotland. The focus will be the verification of data about known business archive collections to inform the National Strategy for Business Archives in Scotland. Analysis of the results of this data collation will provide information that will inform many other areas of the strategy and create a project methodology that can be shared with partner organisations in the rest of the UK.

The project will:

• Gather and disseminate information on business archives for use by heritage professionals, researchers and businesses to improve management of and access to collections. 
• Develop and share a methodology for carrying out a survey of collections. 
• Add value to existing data and share this enhanced data with owners.

We will have a project officer working on this in December and have been very fortunate this week to receive extracted data from the National Register of Archives.  This contains information about over 6,000 business archive collections which we plan to check, update and map so that users will be able to search the data by geographic area, time period and industry sector.  This ability will in turn help to identify collecting strengths and weaknesses and reveal gaps in the collections across Scotland to inform surveying policies and other work.

We will be posting about the project here on the blog as we get started and it progresses.  If you have any questions then please email Kiara or businessarchivesscotland@gmail.com.