Digitisation | lothianlives.org.uk

Would you like to help West Lothian Council Archives in its work of preserving and enabling access to its historic collections? Anyone with spare-time and an interest in history or considering a career in the archives profession can volunteer in the Archives and Records Centre.

Volunteering provides an opportunity to work within a small friendly team, to use existing skills and learn new ones. It offers a unique perspective of archives and allows you to get up close and personal with historical documents and photographs.

Volunteers can assist in a variety of projects such as cleaning, sorting, listing and re-housing records, or help in the digitisation of some of the thousands of photographs and negatives held in the archives. Recent volunteers have been listing estate papers and the records of the Soroptimist Club of West Lothian; assisted with putting together exhibitions and promotional material for Livingston 50; and digitising negatives from the Bob Wallace collection and hundreds of LDC photographs.

The Archives has been awarded funding from the National Cataloguing Grants Programme for Archives to catalogue our Livingston collections. The funding award recognises these collections as being of national and international significance and the project coincides with the 50^th anniversary of the new town. Entitled “Livingston New Town, from Plan to Community, 1962-2012”, the project will involve cataloguing and preserving the records of Livingston Development Corporation; local Community Councils; Craigsfarm Community Centre; the Livingston Players; Tam Dalyell, MP; and the Reverend Dr. James Maitland. The project archivist will begin work on the 18 month project in July and there will be opportunities for volunteers to work on a number of different tasks and types of record. If you are interested in helping in this exciting project then please contact us by the end of July.

We also offer week-long work placements to local school pupils throughout the year, through the West Lothian work experience programme. The pupils are shown all aspects of the work carried out at ARC and are given small pieces of digitisation, preservation and indexing work to complete. We also encourage them (and our volunteers) to write blogs about their experience!

We consider all requests for voluntary placements or work experience, we provide basic training, and work with volunteers to develop an interesting and varied programme of work. If you are interested in volunteering some of your time please feel free to contact or visit the Archives and Records Centre.

By Stephen Thomas

As you are no doubt aware, dear reader, the West Lothian Council Archive holds thousands of negatives, slides and prints associated with Livingston Development Corporation. Thousands of carefully staged happenings, awkward poses, solemn ceremonies, breaking of new grounds. Glimpses and glances into the raising and running of a new town. In a slight rush of blood I volunteered a day each week to collate and digitise this collection using a recently acquired scanner, (a dual lens Epson Perfection V700 Photo with Digital Ice Technologies TM for those interested), and a PC with motivational and memory issues. It was agreed I would start with digitising the negatives, since these were as yet mostly unseen. I sat with some excitement, after loading the first group of negatives, as technology did its thing with appreciable techno whirring and buzzing. What strange and wonderful vistas, people, social quirks, fashion atrocities would be revealed after many years through those dark 35mm windows?

A black and white exterior of a 1978 chemical factory!!! ( 1-3385-A )

Oh well. Important from an industrial cultural aspect, but not quite top secret council shots of UFOs. Excitement only mildly dulled but still stiff of upper lip I scanned the next set.

A black and white interior of a 1978 chemical factory!!! (2-3386-F)

Lovely pipe work, but nothing to write home about, (unless my mother reads this). I realise that one person’s uninspiring plumbing is another’s fascinating photograph of a 1970’s Semi-Chem Oscillating Dynoplunger, that those images I merely glance at will keep other’s spellbound. It’s what makes the project so appealing; the great breadth of subjects. The shedding of light onto the remarkable and varied lives of people in literally new territory, during for them what must have been exciting times indeed.

Finally a few of my favourites so far, if I may:

The family of the 10 000th house built being door-stepped by the great and the good in 1978: (11-3466-C)

The BBC filming an edition of The Money Programme in 1978: (36-3573-B)

Mrs Thompson, simply described as “Grandmother”, 1979: (41-3597-C)

To see the images, click on the Flickr link below