Isobel Reed is SCRAN Digital Archive Officer for HES (Historic Environment Scotland)
What is SCRAN?
The Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network, or SCRAN, first went online on 25th July 1997. It contains over 460,000 digital resources including images, audio-visual material, text documents, and even 3D scans. These resources are drawn together from collections held by museums, galleries, archives, the media, community projects, and individuals who represent Scotland’s shared culture and heritage.
During its first five years, SCRAN provided multiple grants that allowed cultural organisations to digitise parts of their collections to be made available for educational purposes, and it was one of the largest educational online services in the UK. It was used by thousands of schools, libraries, colleges, and universities as an educational resource, and allowed educators to create and share material such as lesson plans and presentations (here’s one fun example – ‘Nursery Rhymes Collection’).
SCRAN was incorporated into Historic Environment Scotland (HES) in 2015 but has sat outwith the archival collections until now.
Image 1- Two SCRAN staff members looking at the first iteration of the SCRAN website in 1997.
How has SCRAN evolved to celebrate communities?
What’s unique about SCRAN is that it evolved from a curated to a community focus. While it started out as primarily collections from larger institutions that were distributed on CD-ROMs, SCRAN later encouraged individuals and community groups to contribute their own projects to the platform to preserve and share community archives, projects and events.
The Gude Cause is a great example of this. This project, active from 2007 to 2009, aimed to commemorate Scottish Women who took part in the suffrage movement. Their SCRAN project ‘The Gude Cause - 2009 Suffragette March’ consists of photographs from their 10th October 2009 march, and provides a comprehensive overview of the day. By having these images available via SCRAN, people are still able to learn about the work of The Gude Cause project, and the website has preserved memories that would be otherwise lost.
SCRAN also allowed contributors to provide and edit their own records, and it’s really interesting to see what metadata is prioritised by community contributors. Compared to larger institutions who might not have had the time or resources to caption every image, material provided by individuals and community projects often have more social context, and they tend to prioritise this over other aspects of metadata such as provenance, dimensions etc. This has led to some challenges when working with the data now. For example, fields such as ‘when’ and ‘what’ are open text fields, so there is a large variety in the format of the data given, and people placed a lot of contextual information in these fields that doesn’t always translate clearly across to current archival and metadata standards.
What are we doing now?
SCRAN was assessed by HES’ IT team in 2021 and the infrastructure end of life was estimated to be December 2024. This was due to the code base becoming obsolete and complex underlying functions making preservation of the current platform unrealistic. The SCRAN Migration Project was then set up to transfer the data content to HES’ Digital Repository so that it could be actively managed and preserved.
What this looks like for myself and my colleague Stef Dempster (SCRAN Archivist) is a very busy two-years! Our priority is to make sure that the SCRAN material is still accessible and visible, made possible through HES’ digital archive. We also have the challenge of preserving the community spirit of SCRAN while making sure it fits within the archival catalogue, and ensuring we represent the collaborative nature of the material. We’ve tried to do this by highlighting contributors in the collection hierarchy and maintaining a lot of the captioning provided by contributors.
Another fun challenge we’ve come across is the large variety of file formats. We’re working with records from 1997 to as recent as 2015, and contributors provided files in a variety of different formats. Some unusual ones we’ve come across include aiff, pm6, w3d, PCT, and lots of others for proprietary software that we’ll need to convert. There are also unusual combinations of file extensions, for example image/tiff files that register as PSDs.
Image 2- A selection of the physical items found relating to SCRAN.
We also hold two boxes of physical material that include jaz discs, zip discs, Betamax, VHS, cassettes, floppy disks, mini-disks, CD-ROMs, and slides. We’ll use our FRED (Forensic Recovery and Evidence Device) Workstation to archive these items.
The SCRAN collection will start to appear online in the near future, and we hope it will capture the community spirit that SCRAN encouraged and gave a platform to over 27 years.
For now, you can find SCRAN in these places: