Project News May 2007

Following major changes at the beginning of the year, work on the Images for All project is continuing in earnest.

February saw the departure of Project Manager Candida Fenton, who after successfully listing some of the Society's archive material has left the project for pastures new. Meg Hunter, former Information Officer on the project has been appointed Project Manager to see the Project through to the end. We also welcome on board new Project Assistant, Heather Malcolm, who joins us for the last four months of the project to help us complete the listing of the Society's map collection.

New Project Assistant, Heather Malcolm demonstrates new map storage units
New recruit Heather Malcolm demonstrates
new map storage in RSGS maproom

We continue to improve the storage conditions of our collections and in March, we took delivery of six new map chest units. The units form two new stacks in the map room, to replace the old broken wooden ones. We were not sad to say goodbye to the old chests, which had stiff broken drawers, although we were pleased to be able to pass them on to Louis Valentine at Tom Valentine Bookbinders Ltd. who assured us he would be able to put them to good use.

Spring has been a busy season for publicity and saw the Society's St Kilda collection featured in various publications such as: The West Highland Free Press; The Stornoway Gazette and The Scot's Magazine.

Meg continues to do outreach work for the project with the Images for All mini exhibition, which this year she took to various RSGS Member Centres including, Aberdeen, Perth and Helensburgh. She also did a talk for students on the Information and Library Studies course at the University of Strathclyde on the work carried out on the collections as part of Images for All.

One of the major achievements of the last few months has been the launch of the search facility on this website. It is now possible to search our map collections by title, author, date, geographical location and publisher then sort the results by date or title. The search facility is made possible by our custom built database, which has been designed by Dr Anthony Newton and Bruce Gittings, both of Edinburgh University Geography Department.

Anthony has also been heavily involved in the redesign of our website, which we relaunch this month in an updated and streamlined form, which we hope will be more interesting, more user friendly and easier to maintain.

As usual we welcome any comments or feedback on the website. Contact