MARCH 2024
A NEW ERA FOR UK ARCHIVING
Welcome to the shiny new website and blog for UK Archiving! We are incredibly excited for all of the changes and expansion going on here as part of our new partnership with SDM Holdings, especially our beautiful, updated website and this new blog. We will be posting here once a month to tell you stories of our most interesting and unique past projects and give you a feel for what the everyday operations of UK Archiving look like.
All this change is exciting, but don’t worry! UK Archiving’s operations have not ceased or changed; we are providing the same premium preservation services that we have always been known for. So, let’s take this introductory blog post as an opportunity to introduce ourselves and take you through the types of work we do.
This year UK Archiving turned 30 years old, having started operations under the name Scottish Newspapers Microfilming Unit in January 1994. We have expanded and evolved a lot since then, but we still run the same project that we were founded to carry out: the microfilm preservation of every newspaper published in Scotland. Look out for future posts about our history and how we were founded, because there are lots of great stories that we are eager to tell.
Alongside producing archival standard microfilm, we have been digitising heritage materials for 25 years now. We have had the opportunity to digitally preserve some incredible and iconic items over the years, which we are also going to explore with you on this blog.
We are a small but mighty team, based in Edinburgh. We are very lucky and proud to have the jobs we have, spending our days handling fascinating and historic materials from all over the UK and beyond. We think that heritage preservation is incredibly important, and not a lot of people understand the work that happens behind the scenes to safeguard heritage items and make them accessible to the public. It takes a wealth of care, focus, and passion to work in archival imaging, and we strive to deliver that on every project and every image we produce.
There have been lots of changes that we have been implementing thanks to our new owners SDM Holdings, and we are working with them on many plans for the future to expand our operations and provide an even more high-quality preservation service. All the digital improvements we’ve made so far like monitors and technical equipment are incredibly useful for our day-to-day operations, but one of the most revolutionary changes has been the installation of some shelves put up in our office to store our many (many) hard drives.
Organising and tidying our office has given us the perfect opportunity to reminisce, looking back over the past 30 years and seeing how far we’ve come. We recently tried to calculate exactly how many images we have produced over the last 30 years and including every microfilm reel and every digital project we have done since 1994, we estimated the total to be over 40 million!
We’ve also recovered many photos from the past 30 years and will showcase more of them in future blog posts when we delve into our history, but for now here’s one from the 1994 launch event for the Scottish Newspapers Microfilming Unit (us when we began!):
We love what we do at UK Archiving and are thrilled to have a new platform to share all the cool things that our jobs involve. Stay tuned next month for more passion for history and enthusiasm for the future!
Written by Amy McVeigh
by Amy McVeigh | 09 Jul 2024
