Sources: NAS and other Archives

[Lesley Robertson]

The web site belonging to the National Archives of Scotland (http://www.nas.gov.uk/) is a treasure trove that's free to use. There is a lot to be seen on the front page, but they don't make it easy to find their catalogue. This link (http://www.nas.gov.uk/onlineCatalogue/) should take you straight there. Click on "search". Put a keyword or words into the top box and then click on "search". You will then get a results page telling you how much has been found. Click on one of the display links to go to a list of everything found in that category. Click on the blue numbers in the reference column to get further details about that document.

I have found that I get the best results if I start with fairly broad search parameters and then gradually focus down. The search engine has been improved and now seems to allow for "predictable" spelling variations. For example, the subject of my OPS is spelt Whitsome now, but long ago was written Quhitsum. If I search on the modern spelling, references to both types of article seemed to turn up. However, if I search on the old spelling, modern references do not turn up. It always good to check what happens with spelling variations and search engines.

You cannot get images of the original documents online, although you can buy hardcopy from NAS if you need it. Buying copies isn't cheap - you get at the information about buying by clicking on the little green circle with a question mark on the screen showing details of your document. However, you will find that the descriptions of the documents online are very detailed and have major advantages over the originals - they're not written in secretary hand, in old Scots, or on deteriorating paper!

The Scottish Archive Network (http://www.scan.org.uk/) site is worth a visit. However their search engine seems oddly selective in what it shows. For example, feeding it "Whitsome" turns up only 4 hits, one of which is at NAS. Why it selects this particular one out of the more than 80 that NAS returns, I don't know. It IS worth trying, though as it does provide hits on other collections (in the Whitsome case, 2 were for the Borders Archives, and one for the National Library of Scotland). Among the goodies on the SCAN site is a currency converter for Scots and English pounds, and another for converting old weights and measures.

The University of St.Andrews has an excellent free site presenting the surviving papers of the Scottish Parliament from the 13th to the 18th centuries at http://www.rps.ac.uk/. Readers can look at images of the originals or use the searchable translations into modern English.

[Lesley Robertson]

I've been undecided as to whether the Internet Archive belongs under "Archives" or on a later thread I'm planning on books, so I'm not including it in the main story of this thread.

It's to be found herehttp://www.archive.org/index.php, and it's currently one of my favourite web resources. It's a massive collection of scanned, out of copyright books from libraries all over the world, as well as other things such as video, music, etc. I've only used it for books, so will only deal with that aspect here.

Click on the link, put a keyword or two in the [search] box, select [texts] from the box beside the [search box] and hit [go]. If they have anything corresponding to your keyword, you will be taken to a screen headed (obviously) Search Results. Click on something that looks interesting and you will be taken to a more detailed page about that book - the equivalent of a library index card. On the left of the screen is a section headed [view the book], usually with a list of different options, each with a file size (take note of these if you're on a dial up modem - even with the very fast, fibre optic link I have at work, it can take up to 10 minutes for a 50 MB file to download). The pdf file will give you exactly what the scanner saw, with cream pages and colour illuistrations (if the book had any). A smaller option is the b/w pdf - you lose the colour. The [full text] option gets you the equivalent of a transcription, but be aware that these files are prepared automatically, using OCR technology, and can contain strange errors, especially if a page wasn't in good condition, or if a strange font was used in the original. What I often do is get the full text, have a quick look to see if it's as interesting as it sounds, and if it is, then I download the pdf and save it in a folder called "ebooks".

I've spent ages using this archive and I still keep finding more goodies. For example, anyone with Church of Scotland Ministers in their tree will benefit from a search on "fasti" and Scotland". There's 8 volumes in the series, 7 cover different bits of Scotland, vol 7 also has Church of Scotland Ministers outside Scotland, the 8th is an update.

Enjoy!