The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Giving voice to city’s heritage
University archivist at Dundee University, Caroline Brown, explains how talking to people helps to tell the whole story
Dundee University’s archives are teeming with fascinating documents, books and images that tell the story of the institution but also of the city. We’re open to all to come and search our collections and we love it when people visit and use the incredible wealth of information that we hold, whether it’s for fun, for researching a book or family history.
We realised, however, that we were lacking voices – we have many, many documents but we didn’t have a big oral history collection. So we went about changing that. Voices and song really help to bring the past to life, to make it real.
We wanted voices of people connected to the collections in some way. We’ve tried to fill gaps in the collections but a lot of those we’ve recorded came to us by word of mouth.
Rhoda Miller, who has done much of the recording, knows the folk of Dundee well, and with her we have tried to capture a range of voices. We hold the records of NHS Tayside, which includes hospitals in Dundee, Perth and Angus, but because we’re lacking information about the people who work there, we might decide to interview someone who was a midwife at the DRI, and Rhoda will seek them out.
It has meant we’ve got a fantastic selection of stories but also a wide range of people talking about everyday life, and that’s part of what makes our collection special. It’s also a key thing that folk will want to look back on in years to come – of course, those big stories are essential to capture but so often it’s the mundane elements of life, the nitty gritty, that people want to know about. Hearing stories from all walks of life is often inspirational. We have interviewed more than 100 people, including jute workers, artists, police officers, politicians, housewives, soldiers, singers, musicians, journalists and poets.
We’ve also realised that, often, the recordings are made of older people – we wanted to capture young voices too, especially when the city is in a state of change. For example, we recorded fashion designer Hayley Scanlan talking about her life and work. We’ll want to revisit her in years to come and see how things are progressing for her and how her life has changed.
Of course, as this is the 50th anniversary of Dundee University, we’ve been recording people associated with the institution, telling stories from the last five decades.
An event we’re holding on September 21 is a celebration of design in the archives. Design is a huge topic for the university and the city and we’re keen to highlight it in our collection too.
The evening is open to the public and will be a mix of playings of recordings that we’ve made, and people talking to us about their stories. It will be hosted by Eddie Small and will feature Matthew Jarron, head of museums at the university, discussing design in the city. We’ll then have a recording of Bill Barr, a former deputy principal at the university, talking about the beginnings of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design.
Brilliant children’s author and illustrator Natalie Russell will discuss how students learn today, and she will be followed by David Powell, the archivist from DC Thomson. We’ve got recordings of illustrators from the Beano, then a live Q&A session with Rhoda and Suzanne Scott, the designer behind the Discovery Walk plaques, the Oor Wullie statues and much more.
The project is supported by Scotland’s Sounds, a project that connects the nation’s heritage recordings. The overarching aim of the network is to improve the care of, and the access to, Scotland’s heritage recorded sounds.
We’d love people to come along on September 21 or to get in touch if they’d like to tell their story. We’re here to tell the tale of this brilliant city we live in and we want to leave an archive that tells that whole story, not just a part of it.