EDINA newsline
December 2010: Volume 15 Issue 4
A high-profile event on 9 December at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics, attended by Fiona Hyslop, Scotland’s Minister for Culture & External Affairs, provided the public launch of a major online oral archive, with which EDINA has had a long association.
Tobar an Dualchais makes available more than 15,000 recordings from Scotland’s past.
The recordings, from all parts of the country and some dating back more than eight decades, are drawn from the archives of the School of Scottish Studies, the BBC and the National Trust for Scotland’s Canna Collection.
EDINA has been involved with the Heritage Lottery Fund project that created the archive since the project’s inception, initially designing a Production Control Application and a Cataloguing Application (for web-based input of metadata) and subsequently designing and developing the Tobar an Dualchais archive website. Project Chair and musician Donnie Munro says the new website will open up Scotland’s past as never before:
“This is the most ambitious cultural digital heritage project anywhere in Europe if not the world. A visit to the website will be like talking to those who walked, talked, lived and worked decades ago.
"You will hear the real voices of mill-workers, fishermen, crofters, travellers and farm workers talking in their own language, be that Gaelic, Doric, Scots or the rich dialect of the Northern Isles.
"Renowned Scots and Gaelic singers and musicians feature on the website including Jeannie Robertson, Willie Scott, Lucy Stewart, Flora MacNeil and Joan MacKenzie. Well-known performers such as Barbara Dickson, Dick Gaughan, Archie Fisher and Norman Maclean can also be found.”