Scran is a Scottish online resource for educational use by the public, schools, further education and higher education. It presents nearly 490,000 (still and moving) images and sounds contributed by museums, galleries, archives and the media. It was established as an educational charity in 1996 and is now part of Historic Environment Scotland, a registered charity and non-departmental government body.
Scran works in partnership with over 300 cultural institutions in Scotland and the rest of the UK who contribute material to the online service. The online learning resource service hosts nearly 490,000 images, movies and sounds from museums, galleries, archives and the media. Subscribers can download and reuse these for personal and educational use in accordance with the subscriber licence. The online service also provides a range of tools for users "to do stuff with things they find". A number of institutions use Scran's open source online tool - Scran-in-a-Box - to provide access to their own data.
Until 2008, Scran was a stand-alone charity. From 2008 to 2015 it was managed by The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS), and had two arms: The Scran Trust, a charitable arm that provided educational access to its records, and Scran Ltd., its wholly owned trading arm. In October 2015, RCAHMS merged with Historic Scotland to form a new body, Historic Environment Scotland, and Scran likewise followed and merged into Historic Environment Scotland.
Scran was formed in 1996, and its founding partners were The National Museums of Scotland, The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, Museums Galleries Scotland and, by invitation, the Scottish Consultative Council on the Curriculum.
In its first five years, it engaged in a wide-ranging scheme of grant awards which allowed cultural organisations to digitise parts of their collections to be made available for educational purposes. This was Millennium Commission funded through the UK Lottery. It developed an advanced licensing system, commended by many, in which the institution retained ownership of the digitised assets, but made these available under licence to Scran. There followed further large grant aid partner projects with NOF Digitise funding through the National Library of Scotland.
Scran continues to add records to its database from institutions and individuals. Technical innovations include "Create" functions that allow user creation of instant documents, the ability for users to save their favourite records to a password-protected "Stuff" account and share these with other Scran users, mapping functions and enhanced cross searching such as SRU/SRW.
The service hosts nearly 490,000 resources with additional educational materials and delivers a peak of 1.1 million hits per day.
Scran utilises open source software and runs on a cluster server configuration with MySQL and PHP under Linux. The searchable database is over 7GB and total storage including all assets is over 5TB. A number of additional websites are hosted as linked services.
The whole system developed by Scran including ScranBase and all the tools like Create and Stuff is available for others to use as Scran-in-a Box. The National Museums Scotland [1] Collections Database, [2] the Scottish Stained Glass Trust, [3] the William Wallace Website, [4] The Virtual Hamilton Palace Trust and Robert Gordon University use "Scran-in-a-Box" tool.
The Burrell Collection is a museum in Glasgow, Scotland, managed by Glasgow Museums. It houses the art collection of Sir William Burrell and Constance, Lady Burrell. The museum opened in 1983 and reopened on 29 March 2022 following a major refurbishment. It was announced as the winner of the Art Fund Museum of the Year in July 2023. It is the only non-national museum to be the outright winner twice.
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Jedburgh Castle was a castle at Jedburgh in Scotland. It was fought over during the Wars of Scottish Independence, and was demolished by the Scots commanded by Sir James Douglas of Balvenie in 1409. The site of the original castle was used to build the reform prison based on John Howard system, the construction of which started in 1820.
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Europeana is a web portal created by the European Union containing digitised cultural heritage collections of more than 3,000 institutions across Europe. It includes records of over 50 million cultural and scientific artefacts, brought together on a single platform and presented in a variety of ways relevant to modern users. The prototype for Europeana was the European Digital Library Network (EDLnet), launched in 2008.
James Hoey Craigie TD FRIBA was a Scottish architect. He studied at the Glasgow School of Art. In 1894 he won the Alexander Thomson travelling scholarship which he spent in France and Italy. In 1905 he was made a partner in the firm Clarke & Bell, its name changing to Clarke & Bell & J H Craigie.
Smailholm is a small village in the historic county of Roxburghshire in south-east Scotland. It is at grid reference NT648364 and straddles the B6397 Gordon to Kelso road. The village is almost equidistant from both, standing 6 miles (10 km) northwest of the abbey town of Kelso. Since local government reorganisation in Scotland in the early 1970s, Smailholm has been part of the Scottish Borders Council.
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The McLean Museum and Art Gallery is a museum and art gallery situated in Greenock, Inverclyde, Scotland. It is the main museum in the Inverclyde area, it is free to visit and was opened in 1876. Most notably it features an exhibition of items related to James Watt, the Greenock-born inventor, a Mummy Cartonnage from Herakleopolis Magna and a collection of British and Scottish art. The principal entrance to the museum is on Kelly Street, in the Greenock West area. The former curator is Val Boa. The Watt Institution includes the Art Gallery, Watt Hall, Watt Library and Inverclyde Archives.
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