As part of my position as graduate trainee I have the opportunity to visit other archive services. On Monday 27 February the assistant archivist and I visited the University of Glasgow Archives situated on Thurso Street. This is the repository for the official records of the University of Glasgow as well as the Scottish Business Archive, which contains collections of important Scottish businesses such as House of Fraser and Stoddard-Templeton. We were given a tour of the archive centre including the search room, offices and stores. The duty archivist provided a very thorough and interesting tour which provided us with the knowledge and understanding of how a higher education archive is run and how that differs to working with in a local authority context.
The afternoon consisted of an event on digital preservation run jointly by the Digital Preservation Coalition and the University of Glasgow. This enabled multiple organisations to get together to discuss how they are dealing with digital preservation as well as what the future of digital preservation is. The programme included talks from JISC, BBC Scotland and Glasgow School of Art. This allowed us to see how other companies and archives were using technology in order to provide access as well as preserve digital archives. This is an increasingly important topic as archives will increasingly be ‘born digital’ and the digitalisation of paper archives is being used in order to prevent damage to fragile or important documents. These reasons mean that digital records will be increasing and we have to understand how this will impact the way we look at the storage of archives.
