Skills for the Future (SftF) trainees, join Scran to gain experience working with an exciting digital collection – The Scotsman collection.

Scran currently hosts over 66,000 images from The Scotsman newspaper’s extensive archive. These were digitised from glass plate negative back in 1999 in preparation for the newspaper’s move from their iconic old headquarters on North Bridge to new premises at Holyrood Road in Edinburgh. The collection is an incredibly rich social-historical resource, documenting life in Edinburgh and its environs from the 1930s to the 1980s. However, very little contextual information was recorded and stored alongside the original negatives and captions that appear on Scran have been created over time from a range of historical sources.

SftF trainees, who joined Scran this summer for a placement, were tasked with carrying out some of this vital research on themed batches of Scotsman images, enhancing and editing existing caption information and metadata in an effort to make each record more findable on the Scran website.

Their placement also involved a visit to see the original glass plates housed at the Scottish Life Archive at the National Museums Scotland stores in Granton. Senior Curator, Dorothy Kidd, gave a guided tour and allowed the trainees to get up close and view the Scotsman glass plates for themselves.

The SftF/Scran experience culminates in a digital exhibition, curated by the trainees, to showcase the Scotsman collections on Scran. The exhibition opens next month at the RCAHMS Search Room, Bernard Terrace, Edinburgh.

Find about more about the Skills for the Future trainees and their placement with Scran on their blog.