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September 4, 2026
Love, Loss, and Literature: Cataloguing the Papers of Irene Jessie Young
My name is Nancy Britten, and I’m in my fourth year of studying History at the University of Edinburgh. From January to April 2026, I had the wonderful opportunity to work with the Heritage Collections Team as an Archive Cataloguing Assistant. During this internship, I was working closely with the fascinating personal archive of Irene Jessie Young. I was especially excited to take on this role because it brought together two areas of interest for me within my own history studies: women’s history and modern European history, particularly the Second World War.
Nancy working on the collection in the Heritage Collections office.
The collection contains the personal papers of Irene Jessie Young (1919–2017), who was born in Edinburgh and later appointed to the Foreign Office at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. What makes this archive so interesting is the sheer range of material it includes, covering almost every stage of her life. Within the papers are personal letters, school records and certificates, university notes, diaries, autobiographical writing, and documents connected to her wartime memoir Enigma Variations. The collection also includes notebooks of verse, drafts and manuscript material, examples of Irene’s creative development as a writer.
Graduation photograph of Irene J. Young, 1942
In October 1937, Irene matriculated at the University of Edinburgh and later graduated with an M.A. (Hons) in English Language and Literature on 3 July 1942. As an Edinburgh student myself, reading her lecture notes alongside her correspondence, particularly her descriptions of student life and the experience of working through papers and exams during the early years of the Second World War, was eye-opening.
Later in her life, Irene published a memoir about her wartime experiences. Enigma Variations: A Memoir of Love and War was published in 1990 and was one of the earlier accounts to describe what life was like at Bletchley Park. In the memoir, Irene describes her role in wartime intelligence, working as a codebreaker in Hut 6 and paints a vivid picture of everyday life at “Station X.” This is particularly valuable given how long Bletchley Park’s work remained classified, and it is striking to compare the frankness of her later memoir with her wartime correspondence in the archive, where only subtle references, and a great deal of reading between the lines, offer any indication of what she was involved in at the time. It is also a reminder of how much of Bletchley’s workforce consisted of women, who made up roughly three-quarters of staff at the peak of operations, but were often overlooked for decades in popular historical narratives.
Throughout the internship, my main responsibility was to create a detailed resource list of the collection using Excel. I worked from an earlier inventory as a starting point but updated and expanded it in line with current archival cataloguing standards, adding greater detail and clarity to the existing descriptions. After this, I worked in ArchivesSpace to create authority records for the key individuals and organisations that appear throughout Young’s papers, helping make the collection easier to navigate and more accessible for future researchers. One aspect of the training that I particularly enjoyed was the handling session, where I learned the correct way to work with fragile documents, bound volumes and photographs. It was especially interesting to discuss the practical steps involved in preserving these materials, and to gain a better understanding of the work carried out by preservation teams to protect and care for collections like this one.
My observations and themes from the collection:
One of the first things that stood out to me about this collection was that it had clearly already been thoughtfully organised before it reached us. Irene’s son, Dr Iain Gordon Brown, formerly Principal Curator of Manuscripts at the National Library of Scotland, had added a wealth of contextual information through printed labels, pencil annotations, and guiding notes throughout the papers. This proved helpful during the cataloguing process, particularly when trying to untangle nicknames, identify friends or understand the background to certain items. More than anything, it was a clear reflection of the time and care that had gone into preserving his mother’s papers.
A particularly good example of this can be seen in one of my favourite items in the collection: a bound volume of handwritten manuscript transcripts of Irene’s verse, which she created for her cousin, Gilbert Young Kennedy (1916–2020):
The printed white label in the front was added by Dr Iain Gordon Brown and provides helpful context.
Some examples of the manuscript verse inside this volume.
Gilbert was Irene’s first cousin, and the two appear to have been extremely close. He later became Head of Cancer Research at the University of Sheffield, and during the Second World War he also played an important role working at the chemical warfare establishment at Porton Down. Despite their very different professional paths, Irene and Gilbert shared a creative streak and an appreciation for the arts—poetry in Irene’s case, and music (particularly organ-playing) in Gilbert’s. This volume of verse is a wonderful example of that shared interest, and includes a poem entitled, “Sonnet for my Cousin’s Birthday (for G.Y.K.)” written for Gilbert.
Love during the war:
Another significant part of the collection is the correspondence between Irene and her first husband, Leslie George Cairns, who was later reported missing in action while serving with the Special Air Service (SAS) in France. Irene J. Young married Lieutenant Leslie George Cairns on 29 December 1943. Like Irene, Cairns had studied at the University of Edinburgh, graduating with an M.A. (Hons) in History (Unclassed War Privilege) in January 1944. He was commissioned into the Royal Artillery and served in the United Kingdom, Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia, before transferring to the Parachute Regiment and then to the Special Air Service Regiment (Army Air Corps). He was presumed killed in action in June 1944, aged 24, when the aircraft carrying him and his unit on a mission to east-central France was lost in circumstances that remain unclear.
Irene and Leslie’s wedding photograph, 29 December 1943.
The archive contains hundreds of letters written from Leslie to Irene. Reading through these letters was one of the more distinctive aspects of the collection, not only because of their volume, but also because of what they leave unsaid. For the most part, the correspondence survives only on one side. Aside from a small number of unsent or returned letters, Irene’s replies are largely absent, which means that her side of the exchange has to be inferred from Leslie’s responses.
There are also noticeable limits to what is discussed in the letters themselves. Wartime censorship, as well as the nature of the work both were involved in, shaped what could be written. Leslie refers to this directly in one letter, noting, “I have to censor my men’s letters,” and, in another written early in the war while he was still serving as an army volunteer, he acknowledges the risks of disclosure:
“I am breaking rules by writing on this particular subject, and I don’t want you to have to burn this letter, so I know you’ll keep it well hidden and won’t even tell your mother and father the contents.”
Some letters bear censor markings, as demonstrated below, while others contain only brief or indirect references to his movements and activities. At the same time, there is little indication in the letters that Leslie fully understood the nature of Irene’s own wartime work, which remains relatively unspoken within their correspondence.
An example of an envelope in the collection that has been stamped to identify it as having been “passed by censor”
2. Some of the last letters written from Leslie G. Cairns to Irene J. Young in 1944, with the SAS letterhead.
One of the ways we are able to see more of Irene’s side of the relationship is through one of my favourite items in the collection: a small notebook kept by Irene as a record of things said by Leslie between the summer of 1938 and the spring of 1940, before he joined the army. She titled these recorded expressions “Words to remember always.” The notebook also contains other handwritten material, including poems and what appears to be an outline for an autobiography.
The entries themselves preserve brief fragments of conversation. For example, Irene records Leslie as saying, “I won’t go into the airforce if there’s a war, if you don’t want me to,” and “I can’t imagine you as anything but very much alive; we’re both alive and we know it too.”
Page from the notebook kept by Irene J. Young to record things said by Leslie G. Cairns between 1938 and 1940.
The importance of literature:
I have briefly mentioned Irene’s appreciation of the arts and her own verse, but the prominence of literature throughout the collection deserves further attention, as it appears so consistently across different parts of her life and relationships.
Leslie and Irene frequently describe in detail the books they are reading at particular moments and often exchange books as gifts. A number of these volumes are preserved in the collection; some still bearing SAS ownership stickers, which I particularly liked as small traces of their shared history. On one occasion, Leslie decides to teach Spanish to fellow officers, prompting Irene to send him Spanish grammar books. In other letters, Irene includes quotations from poetry, often at moments when words of reassurance or encouragement seem needed.
These kinds of literary exchanges are not limited to Leslie. They appear in Irene’s correspondence with others across her life. For example, the collection includes a French encyclopedia sent to her by Dr Jean Ika Fiegelson, a French physician who assisted Irene in her search for Leslie. Similarly, books and reading form part of her correspondence with her Polish friend Roza Niedzwiedz, whom Irene had tutored in English towards the end of the war and who later became one of her closest friends. In a draft of one of her final letters to Roza in 1975, Irene includes a few lines of verse.
Later in life, Irene’s correspondence with Dr William J. Abel between 1995 and 1999 also centres in part on shared reading. In their letters, they reflect on questions of Christian faith and spirituality, and Dr Abel recommends a wide range of texts, from the selected poems of Rudyard Kipling to The Confessions of St Augustine and the seventeenth-century poem “The Desiderata.”
What all of these exchanges seem to show is how literature remained a steady part of Irene’s life, rooted in her background in English studies but continuing through her friendships and correspondence over many years. If I had the time, I would have loved to make a list of all the books, poems, and titles mentioned in the collection and start working my way through them.
Overall, working with this collection has been a really rewarding experience. It has been a privilege to spend time with Irene’s papers in such detail, and to play a small part in making them more accessible for future researchers.
The full catalogue of Irene J. Young’s Papers (Coll-1657) is available on ArchivesSpace: https://archives.collections.ed.ac.uk/repositories/2/resources/85781
Notes from Versailles
© 2026 Eugen Stoica
The European Copyright Society held its 10th annual conference at the Château de Versailles on 29 May 2026, under the theme Copyright, Artificial Intelligence and Cultural Heritage Institutions. The programme covered studies, legislative updates and doctrinal reviews, with presentation slides of the speakers attached here, but the most useful sessions, for my purposes, were the two roundtables at the crossroad of copyright (CDSM Directive) and AI (the EU AI Act).
First Roundtable: The Institutions
The first roundtable, moderated by Prof. Alain Strowel (Louvain University), sat under the session heading Reception and Utility of an EU Copyright Doctrine and brought together four voices from the EU institutional apparatus: Hubert de Verdelhan (Legal Secretary, Court of Justice of the European Union), Emmanuelle Du Chalard (Head of the Copyright Unit, DG Connect), Julie Samnadda (Legal Service of the European Commission) and Axel Voss MEP. The intended arc ran from adjudication through policy formation to the legislature.
De Verdelhan’s contribution was necessarily brief: there is not yet much CJEU case law on the AI/copyright interface to report on.
Julie Samnadda (European Commission Legal Service) described the current settlement as the “tokenisation of copyright”: a regime in which we no longer speak of works but of data and content, with too many rightsholders whose interests are rarely aligned. In Europe, market fragmentation is a structural feature rather than an incident. In the US there are fewer rightsholders and it is much easier to licence their works. There is not much comparable data available for other jurisdictions.
Emmanuelle Du Chalard, Head of the Copyright Unit at DG Connect, set out the state of the Commission’s call for evidence on the review of the CDSM Directive, which opened on 13 May 2026 and has now closed. The priority areas listed are AI, piracy, reserved rights and research. The proposals under consideration include a Secondary Publishing Right, a universal and mandatory TDM exception, and a dedicated research exception.
Axel Voss MEP took a more conservative line. His preference is for a legal framework that strikes the balance once and is then left to operate by itself, with the licensing market doing the adjusting; he floated the idea of something like a stock exchange for IP, where licences can be bought and sold by participants. This, he suggested, would address the fragmentation problem. On AI, his position was that crawling should not be the default route to collecting data, that permission should be sought in advance, and that AI companies should operate under a watermarking regime, with EUIPO potentially acting as a trusted third party for deposit and verification. He also invoked the territoriality principle: an LLM offered in the EU should require a licence as is already the case for regulated sectors such as banking, insurance etc. He spoke briefly about protections for press and publishers and the prospects for collective licensing on that side of the market. He closed by noting that the discussion is much bigger than copyright and AI – a reference, I took it, to the geopolitical pressure on EU regulatory autonomy.
Second Roundtable: The Stakeholders
The second roundtable, sitting under the same session heading and again moderated by Prof. Strowel, moved from the EU institutional apparatus to the constituencies outside it: Paul Keller (Director of Policy, Open Future), Burak Ozgen (Deputy Manager, GESAC — the European Grouping of Societies of Authors and Composers) and Blanche Savary de Beauregard (General Counsel, Mistral AI). Between them the three organisations cover the open-access/civil society, rightsholder and AI developer positions on which any future settlement will turn.
Keller’s opening point was that there is no necessary requirement that everything ingested into an LLM be attributed. Attribution is a design choice, not a doctrinal floor.
Ozgen offered a five-part diagnosis of the current position. First, unauthorised use of works remains widespread. Second, the licences that do exist are concentrated and structured as data partnerships rather than copyright licences in any meaningful sense, with authors seeing very little of the proceeds. Third, Article 14 CDSM (works of art in the public domain) is doing useful work but unevenly. Fourth, the AI Act’s architecture does not directly address copyright. Fifth, substitution effects are now visible, with AI outputs beginning to displace the original works on which they were trained.
Savary de Beauregard acknowledged that AI is not European (basically created in US and China), and that EU datasets are at real risk of being excluded from LLM training pools – both because the fragmentation of ownership makes licensing impractical and because the EU TDM opt-out regime, on a strict reading, gives rightsholders grounds to demand their removal from existing models. EU may be a big market and a regulatory power but if too much time is lost in negotiations, GenAI companies will sidestep European datasets. European creation, she said, needs to be remunerated if it is to remain sustainable. There is no functioning marketplace for licences, no collective organisation that represents most creators, and the time required to build a clean licensing infrastructure is time the sector does not have. Reopening the Directive is therefore on the table, and a universal levy financing authors is, on her view, a serious option.
Ozgen’s response was that a frontier model developer accepting that a levy is necessary is a substantive shift. Collective licensing has not delivered. Levies, by contrast, have an established track record in Europe: they are already used to compensate rightsholders for private copying of audio and video and for reprography (the levy on photocopiers, scanners and printers), administered through national collective management organisations under Article 5(2) of the InfoSoc Directive. Extending the model to AI training would not require inventing a new mechanism, only widening the scope of an existing one.
The two roundtables, taken together, suggest that the next round of EU copyright reform will be shaped at least as much by what the AI developers are now willing to concede as by what the rightsholders are still asking for.
Cleaning Dirty Pages – The Power of the Smoke Sponge
By Abigail Hartley, Appraisal Archivist and Archive Collections Manager
The strip along the top of the page showing years of soot and dirt collecting on the pages
Moray House School of Education has a long and often complicated history. Formed in 1907 as part of a merger between the Church of Scotland Training College and the Free Church of Scotland’s Normal and Sessional School, creating the Edinburgh Provincial Training Centre. They later changed their name to some variant of Moray House College/Institute/School of Education throughout the 20th and 21st Centuries and absorbed Dunfermline College of Physical Education and Callendar Park College of Education along the way. It is this history, with the school’s connections to both Heriot Watt and now the University of Edinburgh, that has led to a large and interconnected series of records that now reside at Heritage Collections.
Whereas after cleaning, whilst no perfect, shows a marked improvement
Documenting the early and modern history of the training of educators, the collection demonstrates not just the changing standards of education, but also those who became teachers themselves. It features the growing presence of women, students of the British Empire then Commonwealth, introductions of new technologies and new approaches to teaching, childcare and early learning.
It is also – at times – quite dirty.
Preserving Palm Leaf Manuscripts
This week’s post comes from Works on Paper Conservator, Emily Hick, who is currently working to conserve a collection of palm leaf manuscripts…
When you imagine the archives held at the Centre for Research Collections, you might think about parchment, paper, or illuminated books from the Western world. However, we also have approximately 180 manuscripts originating from across South and Southeast Asia which are written in a variety of scripts, including Thai, Burmese, Tamil, and Tibetan. These are mostly palm leaf manuscripts, however there are also examples written on paper, textile, and even metal.
Preserving People, Not Just Paper: My Internship Conserving the New College Collection
Today’s blog comes from Katherine Richey, an Edinburgh student who undertook a five-month internship with Heritage Collections from March to the end of July 2025. The internship focused on the care, documentation, and rehousing of two key paper-based collections held within the New College Collections at the University of Edinburgh: The Alumni Photograph Collection, and the Chaplains’ Files of the Church of Scotland.
People are at the heart of every collection, but never have I felt that more strongly than during my time working with the New College Collections.
When I began my role as the New College Collection Conservation Intern back in March 2025, I expected to learn a lot about paper. I didn’t, however, quite expect to encounter so many people – their stories, their portraits, their grief, and their humour – and to feel so connected to them through the material they left behind.
Split between the new conservation studio on the fifth floor of the Main Library, and New College itself, my role has involved caring for two very different, but equally fascinating collections: a series of graduation photographs dating from 1857 to the present day, and a group of Chaplains’ files belonging to the Church of Scotland. While the work focused on conservation and collections care, it also offered a rare glimpse into the lives that passed through these institutions.
A Collection of Faces
The heart of my internship was spent with the New College Alumni Photograph Collection, a series of over 180 class portraits dating from 1857 to the present day. Each one captured a graduating class from New College, tracing students, professors and expressions over a century and a half of history.
Class portrait from the New College Collection
When I first encountered the collection, it was tucked in the corner of stores and had seen better days. Although loosely organised by decade, the folders were all one size, meaning items were often sliding around or sticking out of the sides. Some were torn or delaminating, others just very, very dirty.
Collection on the shelf, before treatment
With a project of this scale, the first step was planning (and in turn, testing my love-hate relationship with excel). I logged each item into a spreadsheet, recording dimensions, condition issues, treatment plans and rehousing needs. This helped me break the project down into stages and order the right materials for rehousing down the line.
Then came the cleaning, with some photographs gathering more than a century of dirt. Cleaning was done in two steps: first brushing away loose debris, then gently lifting ingrained dirt with a smoke sponge. In some case, for example an 1857 image with a hand-drawn name map, I used only dry brushing to avoid damaging sensitive areas. The images responded incredibly well to this non-invasive method, with many vastly improving aesthetically as a result.
Surface cleaning the photographs with smoke sponge
After cleaning, I moved on to repairs. Using Japanese tissue and wheat starch paste, I reinforced tears and crumpled corners, repaired delaminated board, and stabilised weak areas. The limited timescale of the project meant that treatments were focused on function over aesthetics, ensuring they could be handled safely ready for future digitalisation.
Photograph with delaminating corners, before treatment
Photograph with delaminating corners, after treatment
Finally, I rehoused the collection in individual photon paper folders, placing them into groups inside drop-spine boxes. These were mostly organised by decade, where this correlated with the object’s size, but any outliers were also placed in size-appropriate boxes, with each item carefully labelled. The result is a clean, stable, and much more accessible collection, ready to be accessed more easily in New College.
Working on this project deepened my understanding of conservation as both a practical and intellectual task, and a careful balance of ethics, planning, and material knowledge.
Meeting the Ministers
Midway through my internship, my focus expanded beyond the photo collection when I was asked to support a second project: the Chaplains’ files held at New College.
These files, mostly dating from the early to mid-20th century, trace ministers of the Church of Scotland, offering a moving portrait of Scottish clerical life across the period. Many of these men had served during periods of enormous social upheaval, particularly the Second World War, with many files reflecting the emotional weight of that time, including items such as death notices, letters from ministers taken as prisoners of war, and quiet reflections on personal trauma. Here, my job was to catalogue the contents of each file, adding additional administrative data from the Fasti Ecclesia Scoticanae to ensure our records were up to date. Then, I cleaned and stabilised the materials, removing damaging fastenings, before rehousing them into archival folders for future longevity and reference.
Newspaper clipping from the Chaplains’ files
Taken together, these records show how spiritual leaders themselves were shaped by the very crises they helped others to navigate. Many letters were steeped in a deep sense of duty and service, framing ministry as both a calling of faith and an act of national resilience. What stood out to me in each file was the emotional control embedded in their language; their need to appear strong, composed, and unwavering. At the same time, these documents subtly reveal how psychological strain was minimised or spiritualised, couched in terms like “exhaustion” or “unsuitability”.
I hope, from this project, further study can be done into the impact of attitudes of the period, and it goes to show how even in the most seemingly administrative of collections, the human voice finds a way through. While this collection gave me immense technical experience in rehousing, surface cleaning, and cataloguing, it also taught me to slow down, read between the lines, and respect the weight that paper can carry.
Reflections
As I come to the final days of this experience, I cannot help but to look back and realise how much I have learnt over the last five months. Where my practical conservation and collections management skills have flourished thanks to working so closely with experts, I have also developed a deeper appreciation of the true value of collections teams, and the quiet but vital work they do to ensure that our history is accessible for those to come.
My time has been greatly enriched by some brilliant experiences: hearing all about developments of the discipline at the Scottish Paper Conservators News and Ideas Exchange in the National Library of Scotland, spending time learning to treat 19th-century books, and seeing the daily ins and outs of the conservation studio, from pest traps to acquisition choices. Each of these moments have given me a wider perspective of what conservation looks like across an institution.
More than anything, however, I did not expect this work to feel so personal. A lot of conservation is described in technical terms and processes, and of course that is a significant part of the job. But what I quickly realised was that I was not just handling paper, but encountering people. Someone was in this space before me, and this is what they left behind.
Just a week before this internship ended, I graduated myself. After spending so long with the classes who had come before me, this work made my own moment even more special. I was more aware than ever, when crossing the stage, of the community I had stepped into, and the importance of the work we do to ensure their stories do not disappear.
I am incredibly grateful to have had the opportunity to support that work, and more importantly, to the incredible team who have aided me in making these collections remain accessible in the future.
Reflections on IDCC 2026
In February, Robin Rice and I ventured to Zagreb, Croatia, for the 20th International Digital Curation Conference. This year’s theme was ‘AI, austerity, and authoritarianism: contemporary challenges in digital curation’, which made for a very timely programme of presentations.
In her opening keynote, Dr. Antica Čulina discussed her fascinating research into the reproducibility crisis in Ecology and how Open Research practices can address it.
I attended most of the sessions focused on AI and machine learning, and heard about the different ways digital curators are trying out new applications of these technologies to automate research data management tasks. A popular theme of these sessions was using Large Language Models to fill in missing metadata and to provide automated feedback to researchers writing Data Management Plans. These use cases are both very appealing, but as the outputs of the tools still needed to be checked by human curators every time, the presenters weren’t sure whether these tools were saving or costing time. It was useful to hear different perspectives on creating tools for repository users versus for repository curators, and I’ll follow these projects with great interest. I also enjoyed Michael Groenendyk’s talk on using Large Language Models to detect data citations, which allows institutions to assess the impact of their researchers’ open datasets.
Cassia Smith and myself, beside her award winning poster! Photo by Robin Rice.
The closing keynote featured Dr. Lynda Kellam and Mikala Narlock from the Data Rescue Project, who reflected on the past year they spent preserving access to United States federal data and building a community that cares deeply about the integrity of the US government and its institutions.
DCC put on some excellent social events throughout the conference, including a drinks reception in the Emerald Ballroom at the historic Esplanade Hotel, and dinner and a beer tasting at The Garden Brewery & Taproom. I had so much fun meeting other digital curators from all around the world and sharing experiences and knowledge.
Overall, I highly recommend attending IDCC to anyone who’s interested in current issues in digital curation, and I hope I can go again in the future!
To read more about what went on at IDCC26, you can check out DCC’s summary here:
https://dcc.ac.uk/events/idcc26/summary
To see all the presentation slides and posters, visit the Zenodo page:
https://zenodo.org/communities/idcc26/
Evelyn Williams
Research Data Support Assistant
Research Data Service
DataShare Spotlight: A photographic record of a divided Berlin in the 1980’s
Some of the most widely used datasets in DataShare are the collections of photographs of tower blocks and mass housing, both in the UK and internationally, created by Miles Glendinning, Professor of Architectural Conservation in the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (ESALA). Recently, Miles deposited a number of new datasets to the DOCOMOMO International Mass Housing Archive collection, including recent research data-gathering exercises in Belgium, China, Chile, Italy and Morocco. Further to this, are two archives of photos documenting Berlin in the 1980’s. Covering both East and West Berlin, these images provide striking visual representations of the buildings, transport infrastructure and general urban environment of the time, revealing a fascinating glimpse into the DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik), the BRD (Bundesrepublik Deutschland) and the enforced division between them.
To help shine a light on this special set of images, I asked Miles to answer three questions regarding the creation of this dataset.
Mitte – Friedrichstrasse. (Nord-Sud S-Bahn), Sept 1982 Photo credit: Miles Glendinning https://doi.org/10.7488/ds/8062
1 – What drew you to Berlin during this period?
I was drawn to visit East and West Berlin in 1982 by a curiosity to see first-hand what the Wall was like in its ‘mature’ state, and to experience, however briefly, the contrasting ways of life in the two parts of the city – East Berlin a would-be capital city with an alien entity adjoining its city core, and West Berlin a somewhat peaceful, even backwater-like island city-state divorced from the mainstream hubbub of West German life: at that stage, in the pre-Gorbachev era, there was no suspicion that the Iron Curtain only had a few more years of life, and the situation all seemed irreversibly settled in a strange sort of stagnant air immobility.
What particularly interested me were the quirky anomalies thrown up by the makeshift character of the division-line, including strange ‘exclaves’ such as Steinstücken – a few houses accessible by its own bus route through a narrow extrusion in the Wall), and the strange status of the S-Bahn (the local suburban rail network), whose lines in West Berlin were run indirectly by the DDR authorities, and had fallen into seemingly terminal decay and dereliction following many years of boycotts by West Berliners.
Several S-Bahn stations also featured bizarre border anomalies, such as the ‘door in the Wall’ that gave access to Wollankstraße station, and the underground/overground West-Berlin interchange and border crossing in the centre of East Berlin at Friedrichstraße.
Other infrastructural monuments of division and decay included the enormous DDR customs checkpoints complex newly built just north of ‘Checkpoint Charlie’, and later demolished immediately in 1990, or the disused Olympic Stadium bequeathed by the Nazi regime.
Wedding – Bf Gesundbrunnen – Sept 1982 view A – Photo credit: Miles Glendinning https://doi.org/10.7488/ds/8063
2 – Your images are documented with metadata of where they were taken, but beyond that, does looking at any of the photos bring back any particular memories?
The strongest memory brought back by looking at the photos is the sense of ‘suspended animation’ that was pervasive throughout the city, with some bustle in the ‘Ku’damm’ and ‘Alex’, but significant areas of dereliction and disuse everywhere, especially near the border, plus stereotypical ‘communist greyness’ throughout East Berlin, and a general feeling of relative lack of population and urban energy in both halves of the city.
The images of quiet decay and dereliction seem to evoke feelings akin to the ‘deploratio urbis’, or lamentation for lost greatness, felt by Renaissance and Romantic visitors among the ruins of classical Rome: looking at a 1982 photo such as that of the spectacularly overgrown wasteland of Gesundbrunnen station, what one saw was a vista of apparently irreversible decay, with no hint of the spectacular reversal that lay only a decade ahead.
From a modernist heritage perspective, however, many of the structures built during the division today seem of growing historical interest, including West-Berlin’s outer modern social housing complexes such as the Märkisches Viertel, or the extensive ‘Plattenbau’ complexes ubiquitous throughout East Berlin (on which see also the more recent images in the Docomomo International Mass Housing Archive, https://datashare.ed.ac.uk/handle/10283/2927 ).
Kreuzberg – Friedrichstrasse, Checkpoint Charlie, Sept 1982 Photo credit: Miles Glendinning https://doi.org/10.7488/ds/8063
3 – How do you envisage the images in the dataset being used?
As always, it’s rather difficult to predict the very varied ways in which images such as these could be used, but I imagine that they could be useful for scholarly exploitation by historians of 20th-century Germany or of its post-war built environments, or as a more popular level, by enthusiasts for ‘Cold War heritage’ or ‘Ostalgie’?
Many thanks to Miles for taking the time to respond so insightfully to the questions.
The items containing the Berlin photos can be found at the following links:
The wider collections of tower blocks in the UK and mass housing internationally can be found at:
DOCOMOMO International Mass Housing Archive
Keith Munro,
Research Data Support Assistant
Two upcoming Edinburgh data-related conferences
As we all settle into the new year, it is good to start filling the calendar with events that provide new insight, provide opportunities to interact with peers, offer the chance to share knowledge and to have an experience set apart from everyday work. To help with this, it is worth taking note of a couple of conferences coming up this year, hosted here at the University of Edinburgh.
Digital Research Conference 2026
On February 26th, the 2026 Digital Research Conference will take place at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. It brings together University of Edinburgh researchers and professional staff engaged in digital, data-intensive, and computational research to promote best practices, inspire collaboration, and stimulate discussions across various research fields.
Attendees experience a diverse programme featuring keynote talks, interactive panels, hands-on workshops, and breakout sessions covering emerging trends, digital research skills, and innovative methodologies.
Registration is free but tickets are available only to University of Edinburgh Staff and PGR students: Registration link.
Edinburgh Open Research Conference 2026
On June 18th, the Edinburgh Open Research Conference 2026 will take place at 50 George Square and the call for submissions is now open.
This year’s call is based on the ambitious “Recommendation on Open Science”, produced by UNESCO, it recognises the broad scope and impact of Open Research – not just on knowledge production, but also on the world at large. Value driven and built around the values of Quality and Integrity, Collective Benefit, Equity and Fairness, and Diversity and Inclusion, the model provides a foundation for a strategic and principled path forward. Over the past year Edinburgh Open Research (EOR) have revamped their action plan and internal model at the University of Edinburgh to reflect this ambitious and expansive scope.
Image: UNESCO Model of Open Science, © UNESCO, 2024,
CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO [14029] https://doi.org/10.54677/MNMH8546
The organisers are keen to hear from speakers from a diverse range of backgrounds (academic, professional services, and students) and research disciplines. They especially welcome contributions from early career researchers, junior professional services staff, and technicians.
The deadline for submissions is end of day – Friday 13th February 2026.
Registration and submission are open to all, further details and link to submissions: Edinburgh Open Research Conference 2026.
Members of the Research Data Service will be at both of these events, we hope to see you there!
Keith Munro,
Research Data Support Assistant
Data Management for Bioimaging – No-Cost, Easy-Access Tools for Edinburgh
This is a guest blog from Dr Ann Wheeler, Head of the Institute of Genetics and Cancer Advanced Imaging Resource, showcasing their exemplar for metadata capture and data management workflows
When the Edinburgh Bioimaging team, a group of technical specialists and core facility staff, first convened, the question of “What to do with all the data?” was a hot topic. The University of Edinburgh has invested over £50 million in bioimaging equipment, which can generate terabytes of data annually. Managing such large datasets presents significant challenges.
During the COVID period, leaders in the bioimaging field addressed these challenges by publishing metadata recommendations for experiments: REMBI- Recommended Metadata for Biological Images. Additionally, the European Bioinformatics Institute launched the Bioimage Archive, a repository for extensive imaging data, which some journals now require for data submission prior to publication. This is important for those of us who generate, or own bioimaging data to note!
A guide to capturing Recommended Metadata for Biological Images (REMBI)
While this is all great for the wider community, for those of us supporting data generation in Edinburgh, challenges remain:
- Bioimaging core facility staff aren’t the data owners.
- Data storage methods vary widely across departments.
- Using community data repositories like OMERO would require substantial restructuring.
- Re-provisioning costs are high in terms of both staff time and finances.
So, how can we promote data management consistent with FAIR (Fair, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) and REMBI (Recommended Metadata for Biological Images) principles at no cost?
Fortunately, collaboration between Bioimaging staff, College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine (CMVM) data managers, and IT colleagues focused on data management, provided a solution.
We decided on a system involving a form and two tables to record metadata not captured by bioimaging equipment:
- The form: Describes the experiment (e.g., cell types, preparation for imaging).
- Table 1: Details imaging data acquisition methods (e.g., microscope type, live or fixed experiments).
- Table 2: Outlines image data analysis methodology. This is separate as analysis can occur later and may involve different personnel.
Example of data management form.
At its simplest, CMVM data managers can distribute these forms to data owners, who can fill them out and store them with their data. The next step was developing a WebApp for core facility SharePoint sites. This app facilitates easy data entry and sends submissions to the data owner and the relevant CMVM data manager. Submissions can be downloaded and stored alongside the data or within any chosen data management structure. The forms are flexible, allowing for updates or multiple entries if data are analysed in different ways.
The workflow, created in consultation with Bioimage Archive staff, complies with REMBI standards. Completing the forms thoroughly generates metadata, simplifying data uploads to the Bioimage Archive, and compliance with FAIR principle regardless of storage method.
This flexible, no-cost solution meets the needs of all CMVM departments and is potentially beneficial for colleagues in the College of Science and Engineering and the broader community. It’s easy to implement, use, and was well-received by the CMVM community.
Take a break with BoB: your holiday playlists
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