National Archives of Scotland Tour

Image: frieze in National Archives Reading Room

On our second day in Scotland, our final tour was the National Archives of Scotland. By this time, we had toured several legal repositories, special collections, and another archive, so we had seen not only a variety of collections, but also a variety of approaches to making their collections accessible to users. I don't know if I could pick a favorite collection, but I can say the National Archives was my favorite archive/special collection in terms of their approach to making their collections accessible to users.

As with all repositories we had seen so far, the National Archives holds a vast amount of material: legal, commercial, and court records being some of the most numerous in their collections. These collections are housed in three locations in and near Edinburgh, and are used by academics, lawyers, realtors, and individuals conducting family history research.

The Archives' mission statement is to preserve, protect, and provide the best possible inclusive and accessible archive that educates, informs, and engages. In my opinion, they fully lived up to this mission. In order to preserve their most-used materials--wills and church records--which are additionally endangered by use by individuals unaccustomed to handling fragile old materials, the Archives digitized these materials, making them available to all researchers working in the General Register building or remotely.

While the Archives does not have the resources to put all its materials online, they are strongly committed to making the contents of their collections known. To this end, they have put out a grand total of eight websites that make the collections visible to users, and in some cases, as mentioned above, access access digitized copies of materials.

Many professionals who are accustomed to working in archives and with legal documents use to Archives, but as we had seen elsewhere, amateurs researching family history also make up a large portion of patrons using the Archives. To cater to these researchers, the Archives has formed a partnership with other organizations to create ScotlandsPeople, an online service that aggregates various records of use to family researchers. Better still, the National Archives hosts free two-hour training sessions to get researchers started--and hopefully get them hooked on family history research!

Finally, this tour was a lot of fun: our guides Margaret and Tristam were extremely enthusiastic, describing records and opening up closets and cupboards for us, and generally infecting us with their own enthusiasm for the materials they are lucky enough to work with every day.

Edinburgh Central Library Tour

After our visit to the National Library of Scotland, we crossed the street for a tour of the Edinburgh Central Library. This visit was an incredibly positive experience--five staff members, each from a different part of the library, spoke to us about their work. Not only were they all very well-informed and passionate about their work, but they were also very glad to speak to us about what they do at the Edinburgh Central Library.

The Central library opened in 1890 and has expanded from its original building to two adjacent buildings. The Central Library has Scottish, Music, Art, and Children's Libraries, in addition to the standard reference, fiction and nonfiction departments. Further, they have special collections and a digital library. Our tour began with a talk by four staff members, followed by a tour with the fifth.

Like the library where I work in the U.S., the Edinburgh Central Library is heavily invested in keeping relevant to their patrons. Putting a portion of their photographic collections online, communicating with patrons via a blog, and tracking patron comments online is one approach they have taken to staying relevant. The other, however, is to place reading--reaching out to readers and serving their reading needs, be they for fun or information--at the centre of their work. As the librarians spoke to us about how they geared their programming and collection development to meeting these needs, I was impressed by what a strong sense they had of who they were as an organisation, and where this organisation was going.

Postscript: These brilliant librarians also gave us tea and biscuits, in real cups with saucers. At that point in the day, we had all been going since breakfast (or rather the time at which one normally eats breakfast), so having a pick-me-upper was absolutely brilliant.

National Library of Scotland Visit

We began our exploration of Scotland today with a visit to the National Library of Scotland. We did not have an actual tour, and explored the building individually.

As evidenced by my post on the British Museum's presentation of their materials to visitors, I'm very interested in how libraries, museums, and archives can get visitors and patrons interested in the things that make librarians, archivists, and curators geek out.

Right inside the door of the National Library, there is a compact exhibit space that held four different exhibits on Library collections: Scottish maps, the history of golf, the John Murray collection, and the National Library itself. The National Library exhibit, entitled "More Than Books" took a bold, visual approach to conveying the mission of the Library and summarizing the contents of its collections. The entire wall to the left as visitors enter the exhibition space was filled up with poster-sized images of representative objects in the collection--manuscripts, maps, newspapers, children's books, popular culture magazines, and photographs. A small section of text described the objects shown and highlighted that the focus in all their collections is Scottish culture.

In the montage, visitors learn that the Library is one of six legal repositories in Great Britain. This leads in to a display on the adjacent wall in the form of an eight-foot-high bar chart that illustrates for visitors what being a legal repository entails in terms of volume and rate of collecting.

The second exhibit that I was very impressed by was the exhibit telling the story of the John Murray Archive. This highly interactive exhibit could be entered in two ways, but only the front entrance had a plaque giving the background the publishers--who they were and how their collection came to reside in the Library. The exhibit used stations, each one containing period costumes, artifacts, video, digitized copies of documents, and audio recordings that built up a profile for a different author who worked with Murray. Each of these stations contained a digital touch-screen that allowed visitors to access more information, as well as the digitized papers and audio of letters being read aloud. For me, this is what took the exhibit to a new level. Incorporating images and costume catered to visual learners, while the audio recordings of letters brought in aural learners. Melding all these elements in the digital screens allowed learners of all kinds to actively engage with the material, making the history come alive.

With such an encouraging introduction, I felt that this was a place that was actively working to draw in readers and assist them with their research, be it family history or Scottish culture. However, I only found the reader registration room while exploring the depths of the gift shop, and when I walked upstairs to see the reading room itself, I opened the door to find a wooden turret of a desk flanked by two gates that physically and visually blocked off the collection and manned by a librarian who was not particularly enthused by my arrival.

This reception put me in mind of our visits to the British and Bodleian Libraries, two of the other legal repositories in the UK. Both of these had staff that gave wonderfully passionate tours, but when it came to welcoming actual readers into the library, both were much more cautious. While I fully understand the responsibility that comes with the pledge to preserve original materials for posterity, and my own experience in a public library has shown me that readers can be more destructive than rats, acidic paper, and unstable environments combined, I am still discouraged by what would appear to be an active suspicion bordering on dislike of readers. The repositories are preserving this material for someone, after all, and I would rather that the legal repository libraries approach readers as partners in preserving these materials for posterity, and encouraging them to step up to this responsibility.