I'm not sure when this happened, it is possible that it happened in late November/early December and I hadn't yet picked up on it, but the National Records of Scotland (www.nrscotland.gov.uk) has now updated its Research Guides interface on its website, which thankfully means we are no longer redirected to cached copies of the guides in the site's web archive (although the historic guides remain accessible available there). The Research Guides page is available at https://nrscotland.gov.uk/learning-and-events/research-guides/ (found under the Records and Archives tab of the main homepage menu).
A quick search on the web archive shows that in 2020 there were 59 guides available, but the new Research Guides section now has 86 guides available, although this is likely because guides that were embedded within other topics now have their own standalone page - for examples, the Census Records page on the old site had individual guides to each census from 1841-1921, but these are now shown as individual guides in their own right on the new guides index. I have checked a small number of guides which suggest that they have not been rewritten, although the guides themselves are stamped as having been updated 28 November 2025, so it is possible there may have been some rewrites on some of them.
Some guides may have been removed entirely from the guides section and given their own page on the NRS site. The one concrete example I have found concerns the pages dealing with National Registration, and the 1939 National Identity Register, the emergency wartime census carried out in September 1939, just two weeks into the Second World War. This page is no longer found in the Research Guides section, but is instead located on a new dedicated page in the Statistics and Data section of the NRS website, on a new page entitled NHS Central Register, at https://nrscotland.gov.uk/statistics-and-data/nhs-central-register/#. To access the application form for the 1939 National Identity Register you need to scroll to the bottom of this new page. If anyone has come across other examples of things that may have been relcoated, I'd be grateful for details!
It's great to see this finally addressed, the web archive access looked very amateurish beforehand, and it was a nightmare having to use the long URL address to access guides within this. Of course, that does mean that some of us will now have to recerate links to the new guides again within presentations and articles, but it at least looks fit for purpose now!
Chris
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