Scotland, Wales and the Falklands

Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire Archives

Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire Archives completed a large scale collections’ move from one archive building to another with certain items going into interim offsite storage. The team listed, repackaged, labelled, and successfully transported all these records with support from newly recruited and trained volunteers. The project demonstrated effective location control and gave the team a greater understanding of their collections.

Conwy Archive Service

Conwy Archive Service supported a volunteer with lived experience of disability to create an online resource telling the discovered histories of several d/Deaf people in Conwy County. The project has served to make volunteering for the service more inclusive and the history of Conwy County’s disabled people more accessible.

Historic Environment Scotland (HES)

In anticipation of a future move to new premises, HES invested more than £1.5 million over three years to raise standards of knowledge, care, and accessibility across 26 kilometres of collected material. The ‘Move Ready’ Project saw every box opened, handlists updated, items catalogued, housed, and preserved. HES created QR codes and recorded locations allowing full physical and intellectual control of the archive.

Jane Cameron National Archives (JCNA), Falkland Islands

JCNA improved their community engagement strategy with fresh initiatives like public tours, new social media content and presentations to community groups. Coinciding with Explore Your Archives Week, they hosted secondary school children for a work experience placement who gained practical experience, supported public open days, and later continued to volunteer with the service. These initiatives led to a 250% increase in accessions and resulted in more annual research queries.

National Library of Wales

In 2019, 1,100 boxes of BBC scripts were donated to National Library of Wales including 250,000 television and radio scripts (1931-2010) that were broadcast by the BBC in Wales. In the last three years, 20% of this collection, approximately 7000 scripts, have been catalogued. Amongst the highlights are daily Welsh news bulletins during the Second World War.

Scottish Council on Archives (SCA)

This year, SCA launched Your Scottish Archives, a new online portal providing access to searchable catalogue descriptions from the archives of local authorities, universities, heritage organisations and community groups. Launched at the SCA Annual Conference in December 2024, the site features descriptions from more than 70 repositories. The project is supported by National Records of Scotland, Scottish Archive Network, Archives Hub and National Lottery Heritage Fund.