Welcome to the blog for The School of Scottish Studies Archives (SSSA).

The School of Scottish Studies was established in 1951, at the University of Edinburgh, to collect, preserve, research, and publish material relating to the cultural traditions and folklore of Scotland. The extensive collections were built on the ethnological fieldwork undertaken by staff and students over the past seventy years,

Based at 29 George Square, the Archives core collections include a sound archive comprising some 33,000 recordings; a photographic archive containing thousands of images from the 1930s onwards; a small moving image collection and a manuscript archive. The Scottish Studies library (also based at 29 George Square) contains ethnological publications, both Scottish and international, and is used as an important resource to contextualise the fieldwork material.

Collecting has focused on Scottish life, folklore and the traditional arts. Material comes from communities throughout Scotland and its diaspora. The main languages of Scotland – Gaelic, Scots and English – are all represented including many dialects that are now extinct.