2024: A Year in Archives – Culture on Campus

Our annual review provides a rundown of the highlights of a year of anniversaries, exhibitions, screenings and awards.

Two authors: One man

Every year we welcome students taking the Exhibition Interpretation and Design course to the University Archives where we set them the task of planning, designing and presenting an exhibition on one of our collections. This year the students worked with the literary archive of Iain Banks, one of the university’s most celebrated alumni. Their exhibition, Iain (M) Banks: Two Authors, One Man, lit up the library exhibition area in April providing a comprehensive and colourful display of his work. The exhibition proved extremely popular generating media interest from national press, radio and television. Throughout the summer it brought visitors to the university to find out more about a unique literary talent.

Pandemic stories:

2024 saw the close of the University’s Pandemic Oral History Project which has been running since 2021 and now sits in the Covid-19 Pandemic Archive. To conclude the project, the project team adopted a creative approach to sharing its outputs, using film to expand on the findings recorded in a co-authored paper. This film and article combination formed the central feature of UCL Press’ online BOOC Paper Trails in June and invited responses to our project from all over the world. The film – ‘An Unusual Period of Unspecified Length’: a creative oral history of the Covid-19 pandemic – was launched at the History and Archives in Practice conference in Cardiff in March and we followed this up with a lunchtime talk in conjunction with the conference organisers, the UK National Archives and the Royal Historical Society in July. The film was screened and the archive launched at an event at the Macrobert Arts Centre in early June. Sharing this project is far from over and the team will also be speaking at a special online event exploring the challenges of using moving image to gather sensitive oral histories about war, conflict and trauma in the new year – part of the Oral History Society’s Oral History Festival presented by the British Library.

Archives on screen:

In May the BFI screened a comprehensive retrospective of Lindsay Anderson’s work bringing together feature films, shorts and rarities. The season included a rare public screening of If You Were There…, Anderson’s unreleased documentary of Wham’s 1985 tour of China (the original cut of the film forming part of the Anderson Archive at Stirling) and we were delighted to work with the BFI to make this screening possible. The BFI season reframed Anderson’s work for a new generation of filmgoers. Film scholars are also reappraising his work, visiting the archive in preparation for a new critical anthology of essays on the director’s films.

In November we were delighted to accept the Central Scotland Documentary Festival’s Stirling 900 Award for Achievement in Documentary on behalf of John Grierson. The award recognises the huge contribution to filmmaking made by ‘the father of documentary’ and the continued relevance of his work. The Grierson Archive was established in 1977 and continues to attract academics, researchers, artists and filmmakers to Stirling to read, review and challenge Grierson’s seminal writings on documentary.

Scottish Political Archive 25:10:

This year the Scottish Political Archive focussed its attentions on celebrating 25 Years of the Scottish Parliament and reflected on 10 years since the Independence Referendum creating digital exhibitions for two events held at Holyrood which examined these anniversaries. In addition the Scottish Parliament, reflecting on the last 25 years, has decided that they would like to work more closely with the Archive in order to engage researchers more effectively and we are exploring all the ways in which we can work together going forwards.

In May this year we took part in the first Angus Og Symposium at the University of Glasgow, celebrating the wonderful cartoonist Ewen Bain who, though best known for his Angus Og series, also contributed many political cartoons to the Scots Independent newspaper. We have a wonderful set of his original cartoons in the archive and were delighted to talk about them in Glasgow. 2024 was an election year and we also ran our usual community collecting campaign calling for ‘community archivists’ across Scotland to send in the election ephemera that came through their letterboxes during the campaign period. The Scottish Political Archive has been collecting election ephemera in this way since 2011 to evidence how political messaging changes across Scotland and through the years. This year we received a huge amount of material which is currently being sorted and catalogued by our team of student volunteers – thank you to everyone who took the time to contribute.

Supporting research:

2024 continued the recent trend of increasing interest in, and engagement with, the University Archives. This was clearly demonstrated in the enquiries we received (and answered) in 2024, increasing to over 800 enquiries for the first time (a total of 842). A number of factors contributed to this continued growth in enquiries which included increasing engagement with Stirling students; growing interest in volunteering; increased use of our collections by the university’s own academic and administrative staff; and a marked increase in research enquiries from students and academics at other HEIs both in the UK and further afield.

2024 saw in-person visits to the archives reading room return to pre COVID levels with a total of 625 visitors across researchers, volunteer sessions, tours and classes. The in-person research visits to the archives reading room in 2024 highlight the current research strengths of our collections with extensive use of our film and sport collections and the Aberlour Archive being made by visiting academics. Volunteering increased to a total of 296 individual volunteer sessions working across a range of projects. These sessions provide Stirling students with valuable hands-on experience for those interested in careers in the heritage sector.