National Archives of Scotland ~ 23 July 2007

Our guide at the National Archives of Scotland is the Education Officer, and her duties include teaching different age groups, leading workshops, and other educational lectures. I love to see examples like this of the harmonious relationship between information institutions and education.

The Archives are made up of three separate facilities: the General Register House, the West Register House, and the Thomas Thomson House. There is a van that goes back and forth amongst the three sites to deliver requested materials. The General Register House is the repository for holding official records of Scotland. In the Robertson Wing, there are computers for searching digital copies and the online catalog, as well as microfilm and microfiche. In the Historical Search Room, the patrons are able to look at the records for research. The General Register House is open to the public and its records date from the 12th century, with a total of 70 km of items. Its records include diaries, government reports, church records, wills, etc. I was very surprised to hear that the collection is still organized by a paper catalog!
The West Register House contains additional storage and was opened to the public in the 1970s. Its records include court records, business records, maps and plans, etc.
The third site is the Thomas Thomson House, which is only used for storage and sorting (not open to the public). The conservation department does a lot of their work at the Thomson House, which is named after Thomas Thomson, who had set up policies for cataloguing and conserving records. On the website, I appreciated seeing images of an old map, before and after conservation.

There are three overarching categories for the Archive's records: government; court and legal; and private. A recent development is their Electronic Ordering System in the search rooms, facilitated by archive attendants. Researchers must obtain a reader's ticket in order to see original documents, and they can only view three at a time. We were able to see several samples from the Archive's collection. A few of the most exciting were an original letter from Mary Queen of Scots written in 1550 and a scroll from 1495, in which a monk recorded the first known written reference to "whiskey."

Interesting aspects of the Archives: No pens allowed! [This I learned to be a typical rule in most archives.] Parking is a problem for the General Register House, which brings to mind the power of external issues to affect the accessibility and patrons' use of a facility. Our guide informed us about some of the National Archive's endeavors, including "Scottish Wills," a huge digitization project containing wills from 1500 to 1901. It was neat to find out how much organizations work together to meet common goals in the community, as demonstrated by all the national collections joining resources to support the national education standards. Our guide mentioned an area that captured my interest: paleography skills (the ability to read handwriting). When working with ancient manuscripts and handwritten records, it is obviously very important to have these skills. Now I am curious-- I want to learn about paleography!