About the Archives
The School of Scottish Studies was established in 1951, at the University of Edinburgh, to collect, preserve, research and publish material relating to the cultural traditions and folklore of Scotland.
The extensive collections, the core of which is the ethnological fieldwork undertaken by staff and students over the past sixty years, now include a sound archive comprising some 29,000 recordings, a photographic archive containing thousands of images from the 1930s onwards, a small film and video collection and a manuscript archive. The Scottish Studies library of ethnological publications, both Scottish and international, is used as a resource to contextualise the fieldwork material. Collecting has focused on Scottish life and the traditional arts, and material comes from communities throughout Scotland and its diaspora. The main languages of Scotland - Gaelic, Scots and English - are all represented including many dialects that are now extinct. Donations form part of these substantial holdings and include related material, for example, the John Levy Collection, recordings of traditional music from Asia and beyond.
This article was published on Jan 18, 2012