The National Records of Scotland (www.nrscotland.gov.uk) has issued another update in the last day, this time on the ongoing Historic Search Room restrictions that have caused so much damage to the relationship between itself and its regular user base over the last few years:
From Monday 24 October, we are removing the requirement to book seats in advance to visit our Historical Search Room.
We will also begin increasing the number of people who can use the search room at the same time.
The current seat booking request queue will close at the end of August and we will allocate seats to those who have already made bookings. If you have submitted an enquiry or seat booking request, there is no need to contact us again: we will contact you over the coming weeks to arrange your visit.
Records labelled “Off-site” in the online NRS catalogue will be available to order from Monday 24 October at least 48 hours in advance of your visit.
We are working on plans to resume our copying and printing services and will provide further information in due course.
Thank you for your continued patience while we work through this transition period.
We still strongly encourage the wearing of face coverings in communal spaces or when moving around our buildings and recommend continued hand-hygiene and distancing.
(Source: https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/about-us/service-status)
Comment: This is still almost two months away still, which continues to be ridiculous (assuming that this doesn't change again - we are heading back to winter, and another likely Covid wave), but at least we now have some progress, many, many months after the two equivalent national archives in the UK - TNA and PRONI - returned to normal.
There has been a lot of discontent in recent months expressed by genealogists, historians, academia, and others, not least through an open letter penned by Fergus Smith which was published in the press and signed by over 100 active users of the facility from various disciplines (including myself). Whether this has had any impact on the decision and timing is certainly debatable - the NRS has largely ignored any meaningful attempt to engage with its user base throughout this period. But what it did do was to place on record the strong levels of distrust by many within that user base towards the current management of the NRS, which is based in a building that appears to be not fit for purpose, as the last three years have shown. I'm still absolutely astonished that it ever came to the point where the user base felt that it had to bring the press in to flag up the NRS's service failings. But once again, an important caveat has to be noted - this is not about the archivists at the NRS, some of the best trained in the world. It's about the institutional set up and management of the facility, and the denial of our rights to access our own records.
Whatever your interest in the NRS, we need to remember one thing. The NRS is a public institution - those are our records in that building which we have been denied access to. It really is time that the NRS took its user base seriously.
And it's equally time that the Scottish Government took its reponsibilities seriously with regard to its obligations to protect our cultural heritage. Scotland needs a modern building fit for purpose, not a trophy building, so that this type of situation never happens again. There were problems with on-site records access long before Covid.
I really do look forward to the day when we can stop being angry with the NRS. It was always more fun that way!
UPDATE: The NRS has finally issued a meaningful progress report on the 1921 census - see my post at https://scottishgenes.blogspot.com/2022/08/nrs-confident-1921-scottish-census-will.html.
Chris
My new book Tracing Your Irish Ancestors Through Land Records is now available to buy at https://bit.ly/IrishLandRecords. Also available - Sharing Your Family History Online, Tracing Your Scottish Family History on the Internet, Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed), and Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry Through Church and State Records - to purchase, please visit https://bit.ly/ChrisPatonPSbooks. Further news published daily on The Scottish GENES Facebook page, and on Twitter @genesblog.
