About

The Working Archive is a year-long archive awareness campaign for Scotland.

Championed by the Scottish Council on Archives, to support the ongoing National Strategy for Business Archives in Scotland, the campaign aims to encourage archives, their users and the public at large to celebrate the heritage stories behind individual Scottish businesses; the records of products that were produced or manufactured in Scotland and exported around the world; and the archival legacy of working Scots of all kinds – whether in business, farming, healthcare, education, the church or government.

However, the campaign is about more than highlighting the records of business and of working lives. It is also about opening a window on how archives and archivists work. It is an opportunity to raise awareness of the special role that archivists play and of how hard archives often work for the communities and organisations that created or care for them and the researchers who use them. The Working Archive campaign is in this way also a celebration of Scotland’s extraordinary ‘working archives’.

We hope every archive in Scotland, whether large or small, private or public, will support the campaign in some way, by contributing imagery or stories to the Working Archive website or by undertaking awareness initiatives locally under The Working Archive banner.