Some highlights of a year that included creative histories, volunteering with impact and a lot of digitisation…
Aberlour 150:
The Aberlour Children’s Charity Archive was placed on deposit with the University Archives in 2021. It has quickly become one of our most popular and well-used collections, providing a working resource for the charity itself and as inspiration for a range of research projects. 2025 marked the 150th anniversary of the charity and the University Archives joined Aberlour in celebrating this milestone. The archive provided historical content for a new exhibition Aberlour: Then and Now which was displayed in the Speyside Visitor Centre in the village of Aberlour (where the original orphanage was founded in 1875) before visiting the University of Stirling Library. The University Archive made an additional contribution to the anniversary celebrations by adding over 300 digitised copies of the Aberlour Orphanage magazine to our online catalogue.
Creative Histories:
The University Archives works closely with colleagues in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, notably the Creative Histories Research Group. In November we hosted a talk and poetry reading on Scottish educator and socialist John Maclean by the award winning poet and author Henry Bell. Henry discussed his biographical work on Maclean with us before moving to the main floor of the University Library for a poetry reading. The event was supported by an open archive, showcasing the research notes of Maclean’s first major biographer, his daughter, Nan Milton, whose collection sits in the University Archives. The Milton papers are currently being catalogued by our MRes student, James, whose dissertation will look at receptions of John Maclean through the lens of the archive.
The Creative Histories Research Group and archives staff continued to collaborate on the University Pandemic Oral History Project, speaking at the British Library’s Oral History Festival in January and screening the project’s film at the Memory Studies Association conference in Prague in July. Our wider Pandemic Archive was included as a case study in the UK National Archives’ guidance on Rapid Response Collecting and was recently featured in the UK Government’s official response to the report by the UK Commission on Covid Commemorating.
Volunteering with impact:
In 2025 our popular volunteering programme hosted a total of 34 volunteers who contributed an amazing 631 hours of their time to help us improve access to our collections. In addition we were supported by 13 volunteers who work remotely online cataloguing Brig, the University’s student newspaper, and the Scots Independent newspaper. Our volunteers work on a variety of projects developing a range of skills from basic conservation on uncatalogued collections to boxlisting and sorting initial deposits; summarising oral history interviews to digitising collections; and working with us on exhibitions.
One example of the huge contribution our volunteers make was the completion of a project to sort and list the Edinburgh Film Guild photographic archive. An important recent addition to our holdings relating to Scottish film heritage, the archive provides a comprehensive visual record of almost a century of films screened by the Guild. Our volunteers have now documented the main alphabetical series of film stills listing a remarkable 39,000 photographs covering over 5,000 films.
#StirScanStudio:
In 2025 we continued to support the wider heritage sector through digitisation of collections in our ScanStudio. We worked with a range of organisations and groups on projects to preserve and make accessible a range of material, preserving sporting heritage, documenting business history and opening up access to built heritage collections. Our ongoing collaboration with the Bill McLaren Foundation saw us reveal the beauty and value of rugby match programmes, while a major new project with the Scottish Castles Association saw the development of a new online archive which will provide access to a range of material from the Association’s extensive archive.
Our 2025 Annual Report provides further details of our activities during the year:
