HIGHLAND ARCHIVE SERVICE: ‘We take great pride in our work, and in the collections we care for and give access to’
By an archivist at Highland Archive Centre
It has been another very busy year at the Highland Archive Service.
We were delighted to have been named UK and Ireland Recordkeeping Service of the Year 2024 in the Archive and Records Association (ARA) Excellence Awards, receiving 63 per cent of the public vote.
The whole Highland Archive Service team take great pride in our work, and in the collections we care for and give access to, and we are very appreciative of the public support and professional recognition this award brings.
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In addition we were thrilled to win the first Highland Council/High Life Highland Partnership Award at the Highland Council Staff Recognition Awards. The archive and records management team works very closely with the council’s health and social care records support team responding to requests from individuals who were formerly in care and who are seeking to find out information on their past. These requests have greatly increased in recent years with the advent of the Scottish Government’s redress scheme which offers redress payments to people abused in care in the past, and to some of their next of kin.
Using our documents in educational settings is always a pleasure. In the last few months, we have enjoyed helping Lochardil Primary School mark its 60th anniversary by giving tours and talks to multiple classes, and have shared our slavery-related materials with students from Inverness High School.
We've welcomed students from further afield too, with a group visiting us from Argentina!
Through the holidays we have thoroughly enjoyed partnering with High Life Highland countryside rangers, libraries, and active schools teams to share our collections in new and fun ways. We have continued to work closely with the Centre for History at the University of the Highlands & Islands (UHI), taking part in dissertation workshops and public history modules for students, and in September community engagement officer Lorna was invited to be part of a panel discussion about using archives. This session was held at the University of Strathclyde and attended by students from across Scotland.
Our partnership with Fife College and HMP Inverness continues to be incredibly rewarding and following our latest collaboration, looking at superstition, myth and folklore in the Highlands, prison learners have produced some fantastic artwork.
If you'd like to learn more about archives and family history then why not consider booking onto our upcoming classes? Contact us for information about: Archives for Beginners (Crime Records, Poor Relief, Estate Papers, Family and Personal Papers) and Family History for Beginners (Statutory Records, Census Records, Old Parish Records and Wills, Scotland’s People Network), at archives@highlifehighland.com or call 01349 781130.
