Showcasing SCRAN (Scotland's history at the click of a mouse)

Have you visited the Whittaker Library and Information Services website, at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland?


We offer much more than printed and audiovisual materials!  Staff and students of the Royal Conservatoire can access quality electronic resources through our website.  Our digital offerings include various useful databases.  Sometimes they're useful in more ways than you'd imagine.


Take SCRAN, for example.  Scottish materials of all sorts, including images, pages of old books and music, portraits ...

• BA in Scottish Music students might find useful source materials, or even images for back-projecting during a performance
• Costume and theatre designers will find masses of illustrations of fashions and every aspect of contemporary life in any historic period
• Surprise yourself - try an old cake recipe, or cook a Christmas pudding as your great-grandmother would have done!
• You can even pull out stuff on a particular theme, such as Christmas, or war.  A particularly poignant one is a photo of soldiers celebrating Christmas in the trenches, Western Front, during World War I. Here's part of the caption:-

This photograph shows a dozen men sitting in the mud in a trench celebrating Christmas. They have laid some white paper on a crate and set out some slices of cake, a tinned pudding, a packet of raisins and what looks like an orange. These may have been in a food parcel from home, shared by a group of friends.


The photograph's original caption reads, 'Tommy's Xmas on the West.' There is a poignancy about these men celebrating Christmas, the Christian festival for the birth of Christ and 'peace and goodwill to all men', while behind them there is a crude wooden cross over the grave of a dead soldier.

Direct access from within Royal Conservatoire premises.  Institutional access from outside.  (Identify us from a list then use your Royal Conservatoire staff or student ID and password.)

Images can be used educationally, but we're not permitted to put them on a publicly accessible website. So the Christmas pud is from Creative Commons, not Scran!