Events

Conference, AGM & Events

2025 Conference

The Business Archives Council of Scotland and the Business Archives Council will hold their joint annual conference at the National Railway Museum in York on the 13th November this year.

Our theme is Just the Ticket! Changing tracks and bridging the gaps in core archival practices. This conference theme will explore the idea of going back to basics in our modern world and provide an opporunity to share new approaches to core archival activities such as appraisal and cataloguing, collections care and access to archives. As well as innovative ways in which archivists have advocated for their service, positioned themselves in their organisation or delivered outreach activities. 

We are keen to hear from business archivists in a corporate setting but also those caring for business archive collections in public repositories or community archives. As well as researchers who have made use of business collections to inform their work in new ways. 

We’re pleased to share our Call for Papers and look forward to receiving submissions by the 15th June.

Conference Bursaries

The Business Archives Council of Scotland and the Business Archives Council make available up to four bursaries to attend their joint annual conference. Bursaries are open to members and non-members of the BAC and BACS. Applicants for the bursaries needed to meet one of the following criteria:

• Be a student or
• Be a recent graduate (in the last 3 years) or
• Be a qualified archivist, currently out-of-employment (this excludes consultants and freelancers) or
• Be retired from the archives profession or retired with an interest in business history

The bursary covers full conference attendance, including up to £150 for travel & accommodation expenses (receipts will be required ahead of reimbursement.) The following should also be noted:

• Applicants must confirm that any costs they claim will not be paid by their employer, and that their employer has not already registered them as a delegate at the Conferences.
• Successful applicants will be asked to provide a short report on their experience at the conference to be used in various BAC & BACS communications and encouraged to contribute to the reporting of the conference through social media while the conference is taking place.

2025 AGM

The 2025 AGM for the Business Archives Council of Scotland took place on Thursday 12th June at the Scotch Whisky Experience in Edinburgh.

The papers discussed are below:

• 2025 AGM Agenda
• 2024 AGM Minutes
• 2025 Annual Report & Accounts

Business Bites

Business Bites

Since 2023, the Business Archives Council of Scotland and the Business Archives Council have presented a joint programme of regular online webinars on subjects related to Business Archives.

Business Bites is the name of this initiative to encourage conversations, bringing together the small community of business archivists and custodians of business archives across the UK, many of whom work alone, to share our experiences.

Business Bites: Records at Risk

Our third Business Bites session of 2025 will be held on Wednesday, 25th June on the theme of Records at Risk. Bookings are now open.

• Where: Online – via Zoom
• When: Wednesday, 25th June 2025, 12.30pm
• Book: OPEN TO ALL book your ticket via Whitefuse

Hosted by the UK Crisis Management Team in partnership with the ARA Section for Business Records. This session will hear from the UK National Archives about their records at risk support and the UK Crisis Management Team which coordinates responses to records at risk cases in the business archives sector to highlight resources they have available and some recent examples.

We will also have two collection focused case studies:

• Penny Hutchins, Head of Archives, Library and Information at the National Army Museum. Penny will discuss the ways in which the National Army Museum supports smaller regimental museums around the UK and a recent example of a records at risk project that led to the transfer of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) archive collection from FANY HQ to the National Army Museum.

• Jackie Bishop, Project Archivist: Penguin Random House at the University of Reading. Jackie will discuss their Charles Hasler collection, which was donated to University of Reading Special Collections ith the support of The National Archives following the closure of the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture (MODA) in 2024.

Business Bites

In 2023, the Business Archives Council of Scotland and the Business Archives Council joined forces to present a joint programme of regular online webinars on subjects related to Business Archives. Business Bites is the name of this initiative to encourage conversations, bringing together the small community of business archivists and custodians of business archives across the UK, many of whom work alone, to share our experiences.

These will continue throughout 2025 and we will hold a Business Bites event every two months with the first event in February on Cataloguing Business Archives. The full programme will be shared below once confirmed. All Business Bites sessions are held on the last Wednesday of every second month.

This new partnership means that our online events will be a mixture of member only events with 50% of events still open to all. Normally our regular in-person events are for BACS members who are business archivists or custodians of business archive collections. Not a BACS member already? Come along to see what BACS has to offer and become a member! (Annual membership starts from £10 for an Individual Member, £20 for Organisational Membership, £50 for Corporate Membership).

Corporate Connections‌

Corporate Connections was an initiative launched by BACS in 2017 (and which ran to 2023) to encourage face to face conversations, bringing together the small community of business archivists and custodians of business archives in Scotland, many of whom work alone to share our experiences. Regular social meet ups were held twice a year, with a rotating theme to kick start conversations and let you meet your peers. Anything and everything business archives was openly discussed among friends. From 2020, due to Covid-19 lockdown restrictions, our Corporate Connections events moved online. The BACS team invited those with an interest in business archives to these informal online talks where current challenges, successes and ideas were shared over virtual tea and biscuits (to be provided by the attendees!)