3 November 2003
Scottish Archives Project
Launching www.scan.org.uk last week in Edinburgh, Magnus Magnusson told the assembled audience of over 160 researchers, archivists and librarians who have been involved in the SCAN project that, "SCAN, the new Scottish Archive Network, has resolved all my worries about the Internet, restored my faith in human ingenuity and revolutionised my life as a researcher.
SCAN is the Web in blazing Technicolor action, fully quality-controlled, fully peer-reviewed, and fully free of numbskull keyboard-bangers."
The project that had such an effect is the world's largest archival digitisation project: SCAN (Scottish Archive Network) is a £4 million project supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund. www.scan.org.uk covers the contents of 52 of Scotland's major archives and contains, e.g. 400 years of Scottish wills and testaments plus thousands of other Scottish records, all now accessible online. It took over 4 years to digitise millions of pages of historical records and index more than 20,000 collections.
Magnus called it, "One of the Marvels of the Modern World, fittingly supported by a grant of £3 million from the Heritage Lottery Fund and £1 million of matched funding from the National Archives of Scotland and the Genealogical Society of Utah, the world leaders in digitisation technology. And let us not forget that this digitisation process is saving these priceless documents from further damage"
Rob Mildren, SCAN Project Director said, "Scotland's archives are not just the province of academic historians and family-tree hunters. They are used by a wide variety of people, including house-purchasers, school pupils, students, local historians, lawyers, journalists, architects, surveyors, artists, authors, medical researchers, engineers, planners, the business community, and anyone interested in the decision-making of Scotland's government, local government, businesses and other institutions from the 12th century until the present."
The Scottish Archive Network (SCAN) is part of a nation-wide endeavour to open up archive collections to a wider audience. In August 1999 agreement was reached between over 40 Scottish archives to co-operate on a huge cataloguing and digitisation project. Since then more archives have joined the project, taking the number of participants to 52. They include the archives of 25 local councils and health boards, the archives and special collections of 12 universities or centres of higher education, national institutions, such as the National Archives of Scotland, the National Library of Scotland, the Scottish Screen Archive and Scottish Theatre Archive, and other specialist archives, such as the Royal College of Nursing Archives, the Royal Bank of Scotland Group Archives, and the Scottish Jewish Archives Centre.
The SCAN project is currently digitising other resources, with the intention of making them accessible through the Scottish Documents website in future. These include kirk session records of the Church of Scotland from the 16th century to 1902. The online catalogues and research tools will continue to be developed. The Scottish Archive Network is co-operating with other archive, information and genealogy projects, such as the Scottish Council on Archives and the Scottish Family History Service project.
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