Scottish Readers Remember: Reading in Scotland in the Twentieth Century

Project start date: 2006-05

Project end date: 2009-06

Scottish Readers Remember aims to record the reading experiences of Scots in the twentieth century. Reading once represented a large gap in our knowledge of social history, particularly reading as a factor in working-class experience. The gap has been narrowed for the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Professor Jonathan Rose and others drawing on a wealth of memoirs, autobiographies and diaries. A quantitative balance has been provided by the use of library and other records such as in the RGU-based study of Edzell Public Library. However, Scottish Readers Remember is the first sustained and focused attempt to record the reading memories of the generation that is now in its late 60s and above. The memories of this generation are at risk of loss due to increasing age. There is no such coherent archive of reading experiences in Scotland or indeed the UK. The primary aim of the project is to initiate and establish an initial oral and social history archive and database of around eighty interviews (2 - 3 hours duration each), relating to reading in Scotland in the twentieth century. The archive of reading experience will provide valuable evidence not only of changing tastes, practices, and habits but also of the contribution of reading to an individual and collective sense of identity. The collected and transcribed interviews, which will be placed in the pre-existing archive, will be used as the basis in 2008-2009 of a touring exhibition and workshops designed to increase knowledge of and interest in further scholarly and student exploitation of the resource. Generation of HTML files from RTF data for web-delivery of index sheets; Production of compressed JPEG files from uncompressed TIFF files for web dissemination