Acknowledgements

Central to the Archive Centre’s ethos is stripping away the mystery around archives and access to them. Part of this is opening our doors to all communities and the new Community Tools section on our website supports this vision. With funding from the Scottish Government we were able to take this one step further and create the Social Enterprise Archiving Toolkit. Kirsty Menzies, our Project Archivist, perfectly explains the toolkit’s concept and how it can be used not only by the sector but the community too. It is wonderful to see this idea of grassroots archiving brought to life. Achieved during a pandemic, often from a makeshift home office, I have a collective of enthusiastic and dedicated people to thank.

Our thanks obviously go to the Scottish Government for believing in our vision and funding the project. This is the second phase of funding to support our Social Enterprise Collection Scotland. Led and supported by Dr Gillian Murray from our Yunus Centre this innovative collaboration has been far reaching in the sector.

Kirsty worked tirelessly from home in lockdowns and under restrictions to create jargon free content that captures our approach to archiving from the ground up. Our narrative was brought to life by GCU’s Gordon Hunter and Richard Barrett of Gilmour Graphics creating vibrant visuals and design to engage our audience. GCU’s Craig Telfer ventured into the Archive Centre to encourage, capture and edit Kirsty’s video introduction to the toolkit. Our Library’s Collection and Discovery team, and in particular Seth Thompson, continuously created and updated our web content at a time of difficult staffing constraints.

I think it is fair to say that this project captures the community and collective spirit of the past year. Relationships have flourished and we also helped each other with chat, laughter and tears. Thank you to all involved.

Carole McCallum
University Archivist
April 2021