Meet the Archivists 2013

On Friday 20th September, a FREE workshop to encourage students and academic researchers to make the most of Business Archives will be held at Evolution House, Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh.


This is the 2nd Meet the Archivists event that the Business Archives Council of Scotland, the Scottish Council on Archives have organised and it aims to bring together artists and archivists to discuss and explore with students how business archive collections can be used for their research.

This year the focus is on creative and design use of business archives. So the event is aimed at college of art students, architectural and design students/academics but all are welcome.

We will have speakers that include artists and archivists discussing interesting and creative projects based on business archives like the Bartholomew Archive at NLS, the Stoddard-Templeton Archive at GUAS plus discussions by archivists from both Edinburgh College of Art and Glasgow School of Art and the Textile Archive at Heriot-Watt University on how their collections act as a source of creative inspiration.

You can find out more and register for the event via eventbrite.

This is a Working Archive event and you can find out more about the campaign here.

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Extraordinary working lives

To support The Working Archive campaign, we have recently launched a blog to complement the web pages we have on the Scottish Council on Archives website.

The blog will celebrate and share unique stories of Scot's working lives from archive collections held across Scotland in archives, museums or personal collections.

Do you have an extraordinary story? Please contact the SCA or Kiara if you would like to contribute to the blog.

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Case Study: Supporting Business in your Community

I'm very pleased to be able to blog about our first bi-lingual case study from Tasglann nan Eilean Siar (Hebridean Archives) and the Harris Tweed Authority.

The Tasglann has been working with business and industry in the Outer Hebrides to advise and assist them in managing their records. Their aim is to help businesses to make better use of a key asset: their records, be it for administrative purposes, marketing, or legal defence.

The case study discusses how the Tasglann worked with the Harris Tweed Authority to undertake a full survey of their archive records, uncovering and listing numerous case files relating to trademark defence. Following the survey, these files are now accessible and easy to locate allowing the Authority to utilise them more easily in supporting their ongoing work and marketing.

The full case study is available in English and Gaelic and the others can be found here.

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The Working Archive

The Working Archive is a year-long archive awareness campaign for Scotland that is launching today.

 

Championed by the Scottish Council on Archives, to support the ongoing National Strategy for Business Archives in Scotland, the campaign aims to encourage archives, their users and the public at large to celebrate the unique stories behind individual Scottish businesses; the records of products that were produced or manufactured in Scotland and exported around the world; and the archival legacy of working Scots of all kinds - whether in business, farming, healthcare, education, the church or government.

 

The Working Archive campaign will celebrate the people behind the records - whether the workers and staff of businesses, the communities within which businesses are based or trade or the archivists and curators who work to preserve these records today.

 

We want archivists and archives from all over Scotland to get involved and there are a number of different ways you can do so - find out more about them here.

• Contribute right away by emailing us stories about working lives from your archive or about how you are making your collections work for their owners and users. We’ll showcase some of these in a campaign blog during 2013-14.
• Send us images about Scotland’s working past for inclusion in our gallery. Send images to the SCA along with a short caption and a note of the provenance as it should appear – and we’ll do the rest.
• If you are on flickr and have suitable images that reflect Scotland's working past uploaded there then simply add the tag "working archive" to them and they'll appear like this:

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Case Study: Archive Taster Weeks

Our first new case study in 2013 is from the Royal Bank of Scotland Group Archives. It explains how they issued an open invitation to students at Edinburgh University to take part in week-long work experience placements in their archive that included taught sessions alongside practical work experience.

It was very succesful and popular with students and in Autumn 2012 was awarded Archive Pace Setter status in recognition of its creative approach to outreach and skills sharing.

The full case study is available here and there others can be found here.

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2012 Implementation Review

2012 marked the second year of implementation for the National Strategy for Business Archives in Scotland.  To celebrate this we have prepared the following infographic to highlight some of our achievements in our second year.

You can download a pdf version of of the 2012 Review to see it in more detail. The image is taken from the records of Scotts Shipbuilding Co. Ltd (GD323/3/12/6) held by Glasgow University Archive Services under charge and superintendence of the Keeper of the Records of Scotland.

• Information about the implementation group, its members and meeting notes is available on the business archives section of the SCA website.
• Our case studies are all available online and we plan to continue to publish more in 2013.
• The resources that we have created and/or published can be found in the resources section of the website.
• The results of the Data Mapping Project were published in August 2012 and you can read the report with detailed information about the project, its methodology, and links to online resource here.

Our Year 3 Action Plan is also now available having been agreed at the January implementation group meeting.

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Conference: The Beating Heart of London’s Business

The Beating Heart of London’s Business: Exploring Company Archives Their Uses and Users

On the 12th and 13th April 2013 a two-day conference, organised by The Archives and Artefacts Study Network (A2SN) and supported by the Postal History Society, the Business Archives Council and the Historical Model Railway Society will take place in London.

This is the second such conference following last year's event in Derby and both seek to explore and expand co-operation between volunteer-led societies involved in business history fields and the academics, archivists and museum professionals working in the same areas. The events aim to prompt an awareness of what these various groups are doing, and to start a dialogue between the enthusiast and academic which may lead to co-operation in preserving and using collections, and furthering our understanding of the past and its relevance to the future.

London, as a venue for the second conference, has been facilitated by John Scott, Chairman of the Culture, Heritage & Libraries Committee of the City of London Corporation, who is one of our speakers. The event is hosted by London Metropolitan Archives and Museum of London Docklands and themes of trade and commerce are drawn from holdings in their care. London is a world-renowned centre for business, a place where the means of communication, written, electronic and physical, come together. It is not surprising therefore to find a vast array of business archives held in archival repositories in and around the City. Whatever your passion, we aim to give you new opportunities, avenues of exploration and fresh insights.

To find out more please download the flyer with a booking form.  Proceedings of last year’s event are also available to download.

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