The Statistical Accounts of Scotland Online was a pioneering digitisation project launched at the turn of the millennium. As Service Owner for the Statistical Accounts of Scotland, I  headed up a team managing this fabulous resource which makes available a set of over 900 parish reports dating from the 1790s to the mid-nineteenth century. As the site says these are “among the best contemporary reports of life during the agricultural and industrial revolutions in Europe. They offer uniquely rich and detailed parish reports for the whole of Scotland, covering a vast range of topics including agriculture, education, trades, religion and social customs.”

Under my leadership, we conducted a project to overhaul the metadata, technology and interface in a user-led refresh of the service. The new service will offer: an improved search mechanism, which will be much more flexible than the current search tool, include new features such as ‘related terms’, and offer more efficient ways of filtering and sorting results; new map features which allow alternative navigation to and through the accounts, and which help readers to geographically locate the parish they are reading about; new modes of presenting contextual information, such as introductions to counties and parishes; personalisation features that allow users to tag and annotate content; new modes of showcasing the content of the accounts through changing exhibitions; revised help texts and case studies that help you get the most out of the service; improved citation assistance.

As part of the Editorial Board, I was always very aware of the fact that this huge and hugely rich dataset held enormous untapped potential for text and data mining…. maybe one day I’ll find a way of getting a project like that started!