National Archives of Scotland

After Dunfermline, we visited the National Archives of Scotland. This is a government agency that maintains the records of Scotland. It is divided into two divisions: record services, which deals with government records, court/legal records, and collections development; and corporate services, which deals with finance and administration, conservation, reader services, and communications. The records at the national archives range from the 12th to 21st century and occupy 70km of shelving. They also maintain a digital collection, known as "virtual volumes", which are the digitized records that are accessible in-house and include access to Scottish wills from 1500-1901. Another interesting website they maintain is the Scottish Register of Tartans, which is, as the name would suggest, a "national repository of tartan designs". The site allows the user to search a tartan that's already been registered (using the name of the tartan, the type, or the designer) or to register a new tartan.

For our visit, the staff had pulled out several interesting examples of old records for us to peruse. One of these items was a lawyer's descriptions of cases. The librarian at the archive had been going through them to find examples of merchant ships being sunk by Germans during WWI. Because the ships were sunk and the cargo lost, the ships owners had to seek a lawyer so that they could be protected from legal action. Another interesting document they had pulled out for us was an old medical record listing a little bit of information about the patient and the patient's ailment. The space for "occupation" on this form was particularly amusing; we found one that simply said "nothing" and another whose occupation was listed as "poor scholar".

Image courtesy of scotsfamily.com

The British Museum

Today, deep within the bowels of the British Museum, we visited the museum's central archives. The archives collection is composed of six types of records--government, meetings' minutes, staff finance, building, temporary exhibitions, and reading room records. The records were actually really interesting, both in their breadth and content. One particularly interesting item we got to see was an exploded bomb shell that hit the museum during WWII. We also saw pictures of the damage. While I've read about the air raids in London, I don't know that I realized just how much was bombed and destroyed here during that time. Every site we've visited so far has had something to say on the destruction caused by the bombings. Other things we got to see included a property deed from 1694 and a folder related to their King Tut exhibit in 1973. The exhibit folder was interesting because it included all kinds of information related to the exhibit, as well as pictures of the lines of people waiting to get in.

After the archives tour, a classmate and I wandered around the British Museum and saw--among other things--the Rosetta Stone. The museum itself is massive and was too much to get through in a day; even after breaking for lunch at a pub we didn't get around to everything.

British Museum image courtesy of foundationstone.org