The Business Archives Council of Scotland organises an annual conference in the Autumn, occasional training days and in 2017 started it’s Corporate Connections event to support networking for business archivists and custodians of business archives in Scotland. Details of past events can be found here.
Events
Conference & AGM
2024 AGM
The 2024 AGM for the Business Archives Council of Scotland will take place on Thursday 20th June. This event will be held at the AK Bell Library in Perth and will include talks on the topic of archives and museums and a tour of Perth & Kinross Archives.
Register to attend via Eventbrite. Programme details below:
PROGRAMME
13:45 – Arrival/Intros
14:00 – Anna Zwagerman, Perth Museum – Ancient Roots, creating Perth Museum
14.20 – Doug MacBeath, Museum on the Mound – A Museum with a Bank attached
14:40 – AGM
14:55 – Comfort/Networking Break
15.10 – Dr Charlotte Berry/ Dr Jill Dye, National Museums of Scotland – Archives in a Museum Setting
15.30 – David Powell, DC Thomson & Co Ltd – Taking Dundee school kids to London: A lessons on gallery and archive collaboration.
15:50 – Tour of Perth & Kinross Archive
16:50 – Finish
Papers are below:
2024 Conference – CfP
In 2024 the Business Archives Council of Scotland and the Business Archives Council will hold their joint annual conference in Glasgow.
The conference is being hosted by The Macallan and will take place on Thursday 7th November 2024 at the head offices of the Edrington Group at 100 Queen Street, Glasgow.
Online attendance will also be available.
Our theme is ‘Liquid Gold: realising the potential of your business archive collections’. Scotland’s most famous spirit and one of the nation’s greatest exports is affectionately known as liquid gold, and our conference seeks to explore the richness of business archive collections. This will include business archives as assets for their own corporate businesses but will also consider their wider value to society and potential for academic research and public engagement.
The Call for Papers is now live and we welcome submissions by 14th June 2024 for 20 minute papers delivered either in-person or online. Ideas for submission include:
- How archive collections support anniversary celebrations in an organisation?
- The growth of heritage marketing as a concept and the value of archives for this.
- Setting up an archive service in a corporate setting and understanding the reasons why a business invests in their archive.
- Ways in which business archive collections can be used for wider community engagement activities e.g. public exhibitions, storytelling and educational uses.
- The academic research potential within business archive collections, particularly examples of academic and corporate collaborations that explore collections.
- Looking to the archive as a source of inspiration for product development or to provide legal protection for brands.
Any questions should be directed to Business.Bites.Contact@gmail.com. We look forward to hearing from you.
2023 Conference
The Business Archives Council of Scotland and the Business Archive Council held the first joint HYBRID conference on the 8th November 2023. Entitled The Digital Everyday Digital: Tools for Preservation and Access. Details here. We welcomed around 60 attendees on site at HSBC headquarters in London and 50 digital online attendees also.
2023 AGM
The 2023 AGM for the Business Archives Council of Scotland took place on Friday 8th December. This event was held at the National Library of Scotland and included a tour of their Treasures exhibition.
Papers are below:
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: Environmental Sustainability
The Business Archives Council and Business Archives Council Scotland are pleased to present the next Business Bites event in June 2024 on the topic of environmental sustainability. We invite anyone with an interest in Business Archives to this informal event where current challenges, successes and ideas are shared at a lunchtime meeting.
- Theme: Environmental Sustainability
- Where: Online – via Zoom
- When: Wednesday 26th June 2024, 12.30pm – 13.30pm
- How: To reserve a place, please click here to book or email Business.Bites.Contact (at) gmail.com Please direct any questions or comments to the same email address.
Last year, we hosted a Business Bites event on Environmental Sustainability. Alexandra Wade from the London Metropolitan Archive presented on the work being carried out at LMA in this area, covering initiatives like circular economy and passive control and the effect these had had on the carbon footprint of LMA.
Alex is back with this webinar to talk about the work LMA has done over the past year to decrease their environmental impact further.
In addition, the ARA Environmental Sustainability Group will be joining us represented by Dr Alasdair Bachell. The ARA Environmental Sustainability Group launched on Earth Day 2022 to advocate for environmental sustainability in the record-keeping sector and to provide the tools and resources to help members enact this professional duty to the environment. This talk will give an overview of the group’s activities and achievements since its inception, and outline some of its plans for the future.
Speakers will be:
Alexandra Wade is an Assistant Conservator at London Metropolitan Archives responsible for Collections Care, packaging and IPM. She has worked on a wide range of tasks from NMCT funded manuscript care, to surveys, re-housing and IPM projects. She is also the Archive’s Green Group Lead, looking for practical and workable solutions to waste management within the Conservation and Archives sector, whilst adhering to standards and good practice.
Dr Alasdair Bachell is an archivist at the University of Dundee and a Research Officer with the ARA Environmental Sustainability Group. Alasdair previously worked as an archivist for the energy company SSE, before completing his PhD in Energy in 2021 which looked at the potential for the reuse of historic mill sites as hydropower generators in the Highlands & Islands.
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 2024 and we will hold a Business Bites event every two months with the first event in February on Research Using 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. Events for 2024 are planned for February, May, June, September, December.
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!)