Drawn evidence - a national example
Archive Services have just successfully completed a path-breaking project, The Drawn Evidence: Scotland's development from industrialisation to the millennium, 1780-2000 which has selected, digitised and produced a searchable web site containing 10,000 images from architectural archives situated throughout Scotland. The completion of the project was celebrated by a reception at Glamis Castle, one of the project partners. Professor Charles McKean, academic advisor to the project said, 'This is an enormously important step in bringing together the architectural collections of Scotland and provides a valuable research resource for academics from many disciplines, to study the development of the built environment'. University archivist and head of ARMMS, Pat Whatley, who was recently elected to the steering committee of the international council of archives section on university and research institutions, was invited to give a presentation about the project at their annual conference in Lima, Peru. The Drawn Evidence model is being considered as a template for similar national projects in a number of countries.
Following the success of the RSLP-funded projects archive services have been awarded further funding of £200, 000 from the Wellcome Trust/British Library and the resources for learning in Scotland new opportunities funded programme. Archive services received the biggest grant awarded by the programme to date from the Wellcome Trust. It will enable a dedicated searchable web site to be developed containing all the university collections relating to the history of medicine, including the substantial Tayside health board archive. The collections will be fully catalogued and 5,000 images produced during the two-year project. Over 3,500 images and text are also being produced for the RLS project, which will be added to the SCRAN web site, which is producing a major visual and cultural resource, containing over one million images from collections throughout Scotland.
Museum Services recently staged an exhibition of Scottish Art from the collections, and the curator has been preparing another art exhibition at the Scottish Fisheries Museum in Anstruther, and a silent cinema display in the library to tie in with his evening classes on film history. Graduation saw the first of the popular historical campus tours which have since been repeated to great success, and will be run again during freshers' week. A collaborative exhibition for the Lamb gallery in November is planned entitled Dundee - the City in Art & Photography, using material from both the archives and the museum collections.
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