An Explorer’s Legacy: The Journey of the John Rae Collection

As part of ongoing work on the University’s historic loans, Collections Registrar, Morven Rodger, investigates the history and provenance of the University’s John Rae collection.

In July 1926, the University Court agreed to lend the “John Rae Collection of Arctic and Other Relics” to the Royal Museum of Scotland. Almost a century later, The Royal Museum is now the National Museum of Scotland, and John Rae’s items remain on loan, but how and why did the University come to have these items in the first place?

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Conserving calligraphy: preparing Esther Inglis’ manuscripts for digitisation

In this post book conservator Amy Baldwin talks about the conservation work undertaken on volumes appearing in the upcoming online exhibition “Rewriting the script: the works and words of Esther Inglis”.

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Reflections on a Journey in Conservation: My Time as a Collections Care Assistant

Back in March we welcomed our new Student Collections Care Assistants; Abigail Miskin, Ella Joyce and Isabela Tapia Hernandez. Four months on and it is time to say goodbye and thank you to the first, Abigail, who has been offered an amazing opportunity to shadow a team of conservators in Italy, learning Paintings Conservation and develop on the skills she has learned here with us.

The Collections Care Assistant role was created for our students to explore the cultural heritage sector through employment and support their career aspirations post-graduation. This inaugural year involved collaborative efforts to optimise the role for students, collections, and service. Abigail, Ella and Isabela exhibited exceptional communication, maturity, flexibility, and a willingness to learn, making the role’s first year highly successful. These qualities also allowed the established team members to learn and improve the role, which we aim to continue offering in 2024-25 and beyond.

This is the first of three blog posts detailing their time with us!

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Is that Vegan…? Conscious conservation changes during the One Health Project and beyond.

By Amanda Dodd, Projects Conservator, Heritage Collections

In this week’s blog, Amanda Dodd reviews the work she did on the One Health Project with a particular focus on this use of more sustainable materials when conserving collections.

A ornate frame fashioned from a piece of wood in a grey box with a small photograph lay on a table to the left of the box.

Above: Rehoused R(D)SVS photograph and ornate frame of O.C. Bradley.

In October 2023 I took over as Project conservator for The One Health initiative. A little bit of background: The project, generously funded by the Wellcome Trust, was a monumental effort to catalogue, preserve, and provide access to three distinct archival collections pertaining to the evolution of animal health and welfare in Scotland from the 1840s onwards.​ These collections include the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies (R(D)SVS), OneKind Animal Charity, and the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS).

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A big welcome to our new Student Collections Care Assistants

We are delighted to welcome three new people to the Conservation and Collections Management Team this month. Abigail Miskin, Ella Joyce and Isabela Tapia Hernandez will be joining us as our first ever Student Collections Care Assistants.

Ella, Abigail and Isabela will be working with us until the end of July on a range of different projects and activities. Let’s hear them introduce themselves in their own words:

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Who Made the MIMEd 4477 Double Manual Flemish Harpsichord? (Part1)

In the first post of this two part series, our Musical Instrument Care Technician (and former conservation intern), Esteban Mariño Garza, discusses his Musical Instrument Research and Documentation Internship project to try and discover who made one of the harpsichords in the Musical Instrument Collections of the University. Continue reading

It’s Friday the 13th!

It’s that time of the year when the leaves start changing, the air gets cooler, and I get creeped out by works in the collection…

As the Art Collection is an ever-moving beast, on display across the University of Edinburgh’s entire campus and beyond, I am responsible for overseeing the transport of artwork in and out of storage and ensuring locations are kept up to date. However, occasionally I can get spooked out by works that I swear that I’ve never seen before – a fitting topic for today’s Friday the 13th blog!

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CRC: A Space Odyssey – Day in the Life of a Collections Management Technician 

My name is Jasmine, and I’ve been working here at the University for five and a bit months as the Collections Management Technician. I’m the other half to Robyn Rogers’ role as Collections Care Technician, whose fantastic blog post about her recent work you can read here, and I work directly with the Appraisal Archivist and Archives Collection Manager, Abigail Hartley, whose equally wonderful blog post was featured last month.  

Abigail did a great job of defining appraisal and the challenges to the archivist when it comes to choosing what material to preserve. The archivist is often put in the position of assessing the ‘value’ of the record, a thorny process which comes with a number of ethical challenges. Thinking through these problems, it might seem easier to suggest that we simply keep everything we receive. If we get to keep everything, we don’t have to think through complicated questions, like what is the purpose of the record? And what is the purpose of the archivist? After all, if something has found its way into the archive, isn’t that an implicit statement of its value? Why appraise at all? 

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Appraisal Made Easy (If Only…): A Day in the Life of an Appraisal Archivist

Welcome to our Day in the Life Series, where each of our new team members will give you an insight into life behind the scenes at the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Research Collections. In this post, our new Appraisal Archivist and Archive Collections Manager, Abigail Hartley, discusses what she has been up to since joining the Heritage Collections team in March. Expect one more post in this series, as we introduce our Collection Management Technician, Jasmine Hide.


You may have seen the other week my colleague Robyn upload a new blog regarding her role as Collections Care Technician. If you haven’t… Go go go! Take a look at the fantastic work she has undertaken thus far. Once you have returned, it is my turn to introduce myself and the work I’ll be tackling for the foreseeable future.

Let’s start from the beginning, shall we? My name is Abbie and I have been working at the University of Edinburgh as its Appraisal Archivist since April 2023. These past three months I have been creating an appraisal process and enacting some practice runs on smaller collections in preparation of being let loose amongst the backlog of records held at the assorted Heritage Collections sites across campus.

But what even is appraisal?

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