The Scottish Archives Network (SCAN)

The £4 million Scottish Archive Network (SCAN) project took a team of Scottish archivists and US digitisation experts four years to complete. It involved digitising over four million unique and fragile documents, and combined the resources of 52 major Scottish archives. The final results can be accessed at SCAN and Scottish Documents.

By working together, Scotland’s archivists, with the support of the Heritage Lottery Fund, the National Archives of Scotland and the Genealogical Society of Utah have reached a “technological milestone” in providing open access to information and historical records.

The project team have converted over 20,000 collections of records from government departments, local authorities, hospitals and health boards, businesses, estates and other corporate bodies into a unified electronic format, conforming to international standards for exchange of archive data. Many Web resources display small numbers of images but the Scottish Archive Network makes whole volumes and series of historical records accessible – the equivalent of millions of pages of information.

The records contained within Scotland’s archives are used by a wide variety of people, including family historians and anyone interested in the decision-making of Scotland’s government, local government, businesses and other institutions from the 12th century until the present day. Of particular interest to genealogists is the project to make a major historical resource, the wills and testaments of Scots from 1500-1901, available to researchers worldwide via ScotlandsPeople.

The SCAN website also contains a variety of research tools, which help researchers make sense of historical records.

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