25 AUGUST 2010 - CATHOLIC HERITAGE AND ONLINE CATALOGUES
We are pleased to announce that searchable catalogues of the archives located at the Scottish Catholic Archives are being made available online. Working in partnership with other Catholic archives in the UK and Europe, we are creating an online union catalogue, searchable by a number of different criteria. At the moment, only a small number of collections have been made available, but we expect this to expand over the coming weeks and months.
Search and browse catalogues at www.catholic-heritage.net
24 AUGUST 2010 - SCOTLAND AND ROME EXHIBITION
The Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh issued a press release on 20 August about its upcoming exhibition ‘Scotland and Rome’, being staged in celebration of the papal visit to Scotland. The exhibition, which runs from 13 to 30 September, demonstrates both historical and contemporary links between Scotland and Rome.
It has been organized by the Italian Cultural Institute in Edinburgh in collaboration with the Royal Scottish Academy, the Hunterian Museum, the Scottish Catholic Archives, the National Galleries of Scotland and the National Library of Scotland. It will feature key archives, manuscripts, artworks and artefacts from these Scottish collections.
Notable individual exhibits will include a papal bull of 1177; the Hours of Marie de Rieux (the Hours of Anne of Brittany) and an Arma Christi (both from the fifteenth century); a letter of Mary, Queen of Scots; and (from 1976) the bull of canonization, which ratified the sainthood of the sixteenth-century Scottish saint, John Ogilvy.
Further details are available via www.royalscottishacademy.org
9 October 2009 - Handling of enquiries
With the launch of the parish registers online we are experiencing higher than normal levels of enquiry and responses will take slightly longer to process. Please do not resend enquiries, they will be dealt with in turn
6 October 2009 - Launch of Catholic Parish Registers
Half a million records of births and baptisms dating from 1703-1908 were launched on the scotlandspeople.gov.uk website - www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk
1 September 2009 - Temporary closures at the Scottish Catholic Archives
We regret that the Scottish Catholic Archives will temporarily close from Friday 4th September at 4.30pm until Tuesday 22nd September at 9.30am. This is due to various events and group visits to mark our 50th anniversary. We hope this will not cause inconvenience to readers and enquiries will continue to be answered.
8 May 2009 - Conference announcement: Consecrated Women - Crossing Boundaries
The History of Women Religious of Great Britain and Ireland group have released details of their conference with registration details on their website.
28 April 2009 - Family History Forum
We have now integrated a family history forum into this website. To participate, you must register as a user of the website using the 'Register' link, shown at the top right of these pages, you will then able to post and respond to all enquiries.
4 January 2009 - Archive catalogues placed online
As part of our ongoing work to make the contents of the Scottish Catholic Archives more accessible to researchers, we have begun the process of uploading our archive catalogues to the internet. Researchers can now download or browse our catalogues as pdf's on our website. The Scottish Catholic Archives has a legacy of more than 10,000 handwritten catalogue pages, with more than 50,000 catalogue entries from those pages converted to electronic format in the last five years. The rest of the handwritten catalogues are being systematically worked on, but in the meantime, we have scanned the catalogues and make them available for downloading. They can be found in the Archives section of this website. It is hoped to have our archive database online within the next few months.
23 December 2008 - Scottish Catholic Historical Association
The Scottish Catholic Archives is pleased to host the new website of the Scottish Catholic Historical Association. Founded almost 60 years ago, the Association has published The Innes Review; held conferences and seminars and worked tirelessly to raise the profile of Scottish Catholic history and historical research. Find out more on the SCHA webpages.
16 December 2008 - Reader registration changes
In line with many other Archive services in the UK and Ireland, the Scottish Catholic Archives is increasing levels of security to ensure our collections are available for future generations. From the 1st April 2009, it will be mandatory for every reader to supply two passport photographs to complete registration. Between 5 January and 1 April 2009, a temporary reader ticket will be issued, which will be renewed on or after 1 April 2009. Full details about applying for a Readers' ticket can be found on the Visit and contact us page of the website.
2 December 2008 - Historians of Women Religious of Great Britain and Ireland
A call for papers for the 2009 conference has been issued, on the theme of 'Crossing Boundaries'. Further details can be found on their website http://www.rhul.ac.uk/bedford-centre/history-women-religious/
28 November 2008 - Homecoming Scotland 2009 - launch of 'Caledonia'
In support of the work being carried out by the Homecoming Scotland project, we are pleased to bring you the following:
Look out for the involvement of the Scottish Catholic Archives in Homecoming 2009 in the coming months. There should be a few big things!
24 November 2008 - New website is launched
We are very pleased to be able to bring our new website to the internet. After operating for five years from our former catholic-heritage.net domain, decisions were taken to move over to the new www.scottishcatholicarchives.org.uk to fully reflect our organisation, and allow modernisation of our IT equipment and resources. We now use a content management system which will allow us to maintain the site with much more ease. Additionally, we will be adding more information - including archive catalogues in pdf format initially - over the coming months. Please come back to our website often and see the changes!
24 November 2008 - Celebrating 50 years of the Scottish Catholic Archives
In 1958, the Columba Trust gave a grant to the Hierarchy of Scotland to enable the purchase of a building to house Church muniments and enable a centre for research and education to be founded. The Scottish Catholic Archives and Columba House, Edinburgh have expanded and developed over these 50 years and hopefully fulfill the aims of the grant. During 2009, we will mark 50 years of the Scottish Catholic Archives. We would be most interested in hearing from readers who may not have used the facilties for a number of years, perhaps with some of their experiences of both research of the collections and the facility itself.