A progress report from our Digitisation Assistant Hanneke on the Scottish Castles Association Archives project
The Scottish Castles Association (SCA) Archive is the accumulative result of various archives created by multiple people over time. So far, I have worked on the archives created by the late Nicholas Bogdan, who worked in archaeology and conservation architecture, and his late brother and former chairman of SCA, Robert Bogdan who studied Medieval History and Geography and taught Geography. Nicholas’ archives on Scottish Castles consists of a large collection of paper files relating to archaeological excavations and photo slides on Scottish Castles. Robert continued and added to this work creating an indexed archive of over 3,000 Scottish Castles. Some of this work was done in collaboration with the late Ian Bryce resulting in Bogdan and Bryce’s ‘Castles, manors and town houses survey’, Discovery & Excavation in Scotland, published in 1991.
When I began working on the project, several student volunteers had already made good progress with preparing the Bogdan paper archives for cataloguing and digitisation in the University of Stirling’s ScanStudio. Preparing the materials included removing all staples and paperclips as these had left rust and created small holes in some of the materials. Replacing these with plastic paperclips ensures that all relevant materials will still be held together in the way they were found. Carrying out this preparation process gave me a good sense of what the collection includes and how to approach the process of digitisation to make it available to a wider audience. Moving all the materials from their original cardboard boxes into labelled archival-quality boxes in a controlled environment will secure them for the future.
Working with these personal archives is a little bit like having a conversation with the people who created it. I am learning about them through their practices, reports, letters, and scribbles—sometimes on strips of paper and sticky notes—as much as I am learning about Scottish Castles. Although my time is limited to cataloguing and digitising, I do read parts of the materials to decide the order of scanned pages when there are no page numbers or to decide how to describe the item in the University of Stirling’s online catalogue. There are many leaflets and booklets written by owners of Scottish Castles and some of their opinions about their ancestors, often based on works ancestors did or didn’t do at the castle or on the land, has made me both frown and giggle!
Additionally, I have started indexing the archives of the late Peter Rourke who created and archived an extensive collection of photographs of castles. Some of these were indexed and digitised by his late wife Peggy (Margaret) Rourke. The collection of slides arrived at the University of Stirling in a folder organised by county, alphabet and labelled and dated individually. I am currently indexing these and cross referencing them with the Bogdan Castles index resulting in one catalogue entry per castle that includes all its relevant files from the different archives.
If you are keeping a record of the history of Scottish Castles or any other archive, you could think of the following good practices:
- Avoid using staples and paperclips and consider buying plastic paperclips such as the ones shown in the image below.
- Remember to add the date, and who or what can be seen in any images that you may have. This can be done on the (back of the) image itself or in an accompanying index in which case the images need to be numbered.
- Keep any files in a dry space and off the ground if you can.
Our project has just begun to open up the archival riches to be found in these personal collections. I am looking forward to continuing this work and to share the next update with you soon.
Dr Hanneke Booij, Digitisation Assistant, University of Stirling
