Heritage Advice and Support

Services for Outer Hebrides Heritage Forum Members

The Heritage Service provides advice and assistance to the comainn eachdraidh when staff resource levels permit.

The type of assistance we can offer includes:

• Attendance at Outer Hebrides Heritage Forum meetings, supporting Forum partnership projects, and liaising with and advising Forum Development Officer;
• Useful advice about where to find help with all things heritage related
  • Internal training videos – you can learn at your leisure and look back whenever you like
  • External advice & information links – keep up to date with the latest thinking or standards in the local and national museum & archive sectors
• Commenting or advising on drafts of important documents (for example Plans, Applications, Policies, Exhibition panels) if given sufficient notice/ dependent on capacity;
• Heritage Grants – Membership, Accreditation and Equipment
• General conservation advice (non object-specific) and informal object condition assessments (charges may apply);
• Use of the Learning Room free of charge by Forum members for heritage/culture meetings and activities.

Training Videos

The Heritage Service has created a number of resources to assist Comainn Eachdraidh and community heritage groups.

• Museum Object Handling Training

• Rating System for Condition Checking Training

• Photogrammetry / 3D Modelling Training – Part 1

• Photogrammetry / 3D Modelling Training – Part 2

Useful Advice and Information

The links below provide a range of advice on various aspects of caring for heritage assets. Click here to jump to Museum advice or British Standards

Archive Collections Advice

The Community Archives and Heritage Group website includes advice about acquiring buildings, digital preservation, best practice guidance for oral history projects:

The Scottish Council on Archives now has a Community Archives resources section on its website with good practice advice on collections care, photographs, sound and moving image collections, digital preservation etc.

The National Archives – ‘Archive principles and practice for non-archivists’ – useful practical advice including buildings/ storage to support people who own or look after archive material. It will help you to assess and plan for the care and development of your archive collection. It applies to all sizes of collection from a small storage cupboard to the contents of a large storeroom.

This document is the ‘gold standard’ for Setting up an Archive. It is probably unrealistic for a small group but it will give you the ‘headlines’ of what you should consider (e.g. constitution, policies etc) and may have some useful nuggets re building considerations for building that will store original archive material:

Advice about Managing and Cataloguing Archive Collections including Database Applications.

The British Library: Very useful and clear advice on caring for archive, paper or book collections from the British Library website, including leaflets on specific topics and diagrams.

Museum Collections Advice

The Collection Trust: helps museums work with the information that connects collections and audiences. Their site has everything from basic entry forms and templates for collection policies to information about digitising collections:

Spectrum is the UK museum collections management standard that is also used around the world. Learn all about it here.

You can find everything from cataloguing software, ‘how-to’ guides for practical tasks and digital heritage here.

For information about Museum Accreditation standards see here.

Museums Galleries Scotland: The resources on the Museum Accreditation scheme website have a lot of useful information about Caring for Museum Collections whether you intend to go down this route or not.

Association of Independent Museums (AIM): This website has a lot of useful resources, in particular the AIM Success Guides. This covers topics such as Privacy & Data Regulations in Small Museums, Retail Success, Trustees, Admission Pricing, Business Rates, etc

Museum Association: Their resources cover current issues such as Museum Ethics, Anti-racism and Climate Change

Kids in Museums: Their resources cover all aspects of welcoming kids and their parents including Creating Family Friendly Exhibitions, Families with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities, Marketing your Museum to Families, etc

Group for Education in Museums (GEM): Their resources covers many topics including Health & Wellbeing, Dementia, Calculating Day Rates for Freelancers, Student Volunteering Toolkits, etc

British Standards

BS/EN 16893: 2018 Conservation of Cultural Heritage – New Sites & Buildings Intended for the Storage & Use of Collections – the standard governing the design of heritage buildings, including archives.

BS4971:2017: Conservation and care of library and archive collections. The standard governing collection care, including much on repository management.

BSI PAS 197: Code of practice for cultural collections management.  Guidance on the provision, implementation and maintenance of a collections management framework including: policies, processes, procedures and supporting standards