Celebrating Canmore
May 25, 2025 James Hamilton
Unique in the World
The announcement this spring that Canmore, Scran and others in the roster of online archives and repositories run by Historic Environment Scotland were to be shuttered and their contents transferred to the new Trove [dot] Scot site made me want to reflect briefly here on the impact of these and other similar sites on the Scottish historical photography world in the last thirty years. Canmore and Scran were the leaders and pioneers, but others followed - Capital Collections in Edinburgh and Virtual Mitchell in Glasgow to name two - and between them made Scotland uniquely, brilliantly provided for in the world in terms of its historical imagary and record. These sites were part of the early glory years of digital humanities where the seriousness of purpose and democratic outlook of twentieth century Scottish scholarship took the new online means of transmission and showed the world what might be achieved with them.
I’ll leave it to others to debate what happens next. What follows is by way of commemoration and celebration.
I came to Edinburgh in late 2008, and quickly found that for anyone with an interest in the history of the place it was possible to find images of virtually any spot in the city at any time since the invention of photography. Unless it was Rose Street, of course, whose poor light and low reputation saw off the pioneers: had the radical cinematographer Margaret Tait not moved in there in the 1950s we’d have no hint of its pre-1968 self at all. But otherwise, a researcher’s focus of interest in a particular street corner or an individual building would always be rewarded. This is a depth and reach and utility probably unique in the world, reflecting the special relationship between Scotland (and Edinburgh in particular) with history.
The unheralded people who built Scotland’s online image repositories have been crucial to Scotland’s golden half century as a special place in photographic historical studies. The absolute peak came with the summer of 2015, with the era-defining Photography: A Victorian Sensation exhibition, the publication of Stevenson and Morrison-Low’s Scottish Photography: The First 30 Years, and Sheila Masson’s “Victorian Britain and the Tintype Photograph”“Victorian Britain and the Tintype Photograph” exhibition in Edinburgh’s West End. There’d been fifty years of brilliance leading up to it all - straddling media and audiences, from the television of David Bruce and John Hannavy to Dr. Katherine Michaelson’s 1969 Robert Adamson exhibition, from the rescue of Robert Adamson’s albums by Roy Strong and Colin Ford in 1973 and Dr. Sara Stevenson’s definitive catalogue of Adamson’s works of 1981, and passim, passim, passim.
In the middle of the 1990s came Canmore and Scran.
Canmore
The front page of Canmore soon after launch
“Canmore” is in fact a brilliant abbreviation adapting the nickname of Scotland’s great pre-Norman king Malcolm III into the acronym Computer Application for National MOnuments Records Enquiries. It began during the dial-up internet era in CDRom form as a digital expression of the National Monuments Record of Scotland. (This database stemmed itself from the amalgamation of the Ministry of Public Building and Works into the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments and Constructions of Scotland, RCAHMS. CORRECTION 28 May 2025: I am grateful to Stefan Sagrott of Historic Environment Scotland for pointing out that the Ministry of Works remained a separate body, moving through iterations to become Historic Scotland before merging with RCAHMS in 2015 to form Historic Environment Scotland.). The additions in the following years would build quietly and steadily into a kind of magnificence: the digitization of the publications of Royal Commission’s first pre-1914 golden era, the incorporation of the National Art Survey, the Scottish National buildings Record and the Scottish Office Air Photographs Unit, bringing into one organisation’s websites (as Canmore evolved into the hub of a small fleet of such things) research, scholarship, bibliographies, thesauri, digitized images in their hundreds of thousands and records of many more, all tied by powerful search facilities and geo-location.
Scran
The front page of Scran soon after launch
Scran was a Millenium Project, founded in 1995 by RCAHMS, Museums Galleries Scotland and Scottish Consultative Council on the Curriculum. It began by creating its own environment, funding the digitizations of image collections, both still and moving, for dozens of partners up and down the country and harnessing the results with innovative use and copyright agreements, events, commentary, articles and a host of other activities designed around the needs of audiences across the country with different needs, hopes and intentions. Perhaps there is a sense that Scran was never funded to its potential, but right up to the present day anyone with membership of a public library in Scotland can access everything on Scran free of charge. There are now over 300 partners and half a million digital images. In 2015, Scran followed RCAHMS into Historical Environment Scotland, who have cared for it since.
Capital Collections
Capital Collections arrived with the maturity of broadband internet, launching in February 2008. Edinburgh City Libraries had always been pioneers in the field of photographic history, beginning serious collecting under the inspirational pre-1939 leadership of one of the great municipal librarians, Ernest Savage, and continuing under the guidance of Charles Minto. In the late 1960s Minto and Edinburgh were among the first to take advantage of the improvements in half tone reproduction to publish collections of historic photographs of a city in price-accessible book form. Capital Collections has spent almost its entire career in a period of library retrenchment and reduced spending, and it is to the absolute credit of the staff of Edinburgh’s library services and the City Council that it has been allowed to burgeon into the internationally-essential resource it is today. The site has a particular importance to me, because it’s the collection that introduced me to Francis Chrystal, the Edinburgh photographer whose diligent recording of Edinburgh’s unfashionable quarters before 1939 has inspired my own photography. (The other main Chrystal holdings are with Canmore).
Virtual Mitchell
The front page of Virtual Mitchell soon after launch
Virtual Mitchell is the equivalent of Capital Collections for Glasgow, and is in fact older. It brings together images from the extraordinary Glasgow City Archives, Glasgow Museums, private owners who have contributed materials and other special collections. Glasgow is an infinite city with pyschological and aesthetic scale comparable to London, Mumbai, New York and Paris, and Virtual Mitchell faces an impossible task in having to reduce this powerful magic to an intelligible form. But it has perhaps the finest browsing facility of the Scottish online repositories, and from there the shape of the collections themselves force themselves through. For all the talk of Glasgow as the greatest achievement of nineteenth century urban architecture, Virtual Mitchell’s Glasgow is an interwar art deco retail paradise, a centre for the worldly peacetime energy of shopkeeping, warehousing, railway termini and trams.
Other Archives and Use of Social Media
Intellectually and artistically, Scotland is an uncentralised country - France as it might be minus Paris - and this reflects in the other superb municipal online archives of historical photography and imagery - The Silver City Vault in Aberdeen, and Photopolis in Dundee to name two. But the municipalities and other city institutions have also made tremendous use of other kinds of outlet - social media, social photographic sites such as Flickr - and this has been a major part of the 1995-2025 golden age. There are many examples but I’ll mention two, both from Twitter: the late Michael Peto’s revelatory, dreamlike work, posted by the University of Dundee Archives, and the work of the great Dr. W.H. Findlay, posted by Perth and Kinross Archives.
Scotland’s universities have matched the national and municipal work. The University of Glasgow Archives and Special Collections deserves special mention here: the vast Dougan Collection of historical photography, featuring one of the absolutely key collections of Robert Adamson’s 1840s paper negatives and prints, has been brilliantly and generously rendered online despite the extreme difficulties presented by the original materials. They are also responsible for one of the best uses of Flickr and JSTOR Collections by a major institution, placing photography in context with a wealth of other kinds of Georgian, Victorian and more contemporary images and materials.
Also long established is the University of Aberdeen’s marvellous digitization of the George Washington Wilson archive of glass negatives. For sheer achievement by a single photographer and his company, this may be the greatest single collection in the United Kingdom. It’s recently been incorporated into the University’s new library catalogue, transforming the search experience for images that span fifty years and the globe. More recently, the archive of Wilson’s friendly rival, James Valentine, has been given similar treatment by the University of St. Andrews. St. Andrews is also a world centre for early photography, brilliantly digitizing their unique collection of early albums and images in recent years, something that will surely transform our understanding about the first photographers, their collectors and their networks in the years to come.
The Wilson and Valentine archives exemplify a relatively new form of good practice in online historical photography that Scotland has had a key role in bringing to the fore. With institutions such as national museums and universities building vast online image collections, it matters that these collections work together well. If two collections use different platforms that won’t directly interact, it’s a drag on collaboration and scholarship.
The IIIF Framework
This is where the International Image Interoperability Framework, or IIIF for short, comes in. IIIF is a set of agreed standards for the online presentation of images of all kinds - photographs, pages from illuminated manuscripts, drawings - that increases the ways a digital image can be studied (easy onscreen enlargement, annotation) and opening up chances for collaboration (IIIF images in different collections can be placed side by side by a user in a single onscreen viewer). IIIF knowledge and use has been promoted and encouraged by a series of conferences and training opportunities across the world: I was lucky enough to learn my IIIF with Glenn Robson of the IIIF Consortium in Edinburgh in 2017. At the time, Glenn Robson was based at the National Library of Wales where he’d led innovative work in the digitizing of historical newspapers, but IIIF development was led also from Edinburgh and in an article rather short on actual names, I’ll give two: Claire Knowles and Stuart Lewis. IIIF has drawbacks - it’s sufficiently complex to deploy to need the kind of specialised staff that only larger institutions can ordinarily call upon. That will change when the likes of Flickr follow the pioneering efforts of the Internet Archive and offer their users a IIIF image server.
The MacKinnon Collection and After
In recent years, the emphasis within institutions has shifted from the digitization of existing inherited collections to the ingestation of new acquisitions. One truly impressive example of this has been the MacKinnon Collection, shared between the National Galleries of Scotland and the National Library of Scotland. The National Library of Scotland’s great digitization effort has been mostly textual - a vast project to make books accessible to any online device at any Scottish location - but their considerable contributions to online historical photography began early with the Pencils of Light exhibition of Calotype Club work and there are other examples in their Digital Gallery.
The Mackinnon Collection presented an immense metadata challenge, with many images arriving without location, date or creator information. The sheer speed with which the National Galleries of Scotland managed to move the Collection online with so few detectable errors is extraordinary and vastly increases the nation’s online access to, for instance, Adamson, Inglis and other Rock House photographers and many lesser known and as yet relatively unstudied figures.
I owe the National Records of Scotland’s Virtual Volumes system (part of the overall Scotland’s People provision which includes a separate image library) a debt for the access it gave me to the Mitchell Album of Adamson calotypes. Likewise the National Museum of Scotland’s National Museum of Scotland’s Picture Library which contains material from the Museum’s own collections, the Scottish Life Archive, the National Museum of Rural Life, the National War Museum and the National Museum of Flight.
Last but very much not least in this sprint through the Scottish collections are the University of Edinburgh Image Collections. The University have been innovators in digitizing technique in recent years, investing in new technology that they have used in pioneering ways with materials that include photographs but go well beyond photographs.
Canmore’s end comes because the platform it’s based on - Drupal 7 - has reached its end of life, and it was in any case very much a desktop-orientated experience increasingly tricky in a world where information is accessed on a host of different and especially mobile devices. But was there ever a better use for that platform? Canmore has been an ornament to an already remarkable period, and although online platforms aren’t generally remembered in the way books or films are, perhaps an exception might be made for Malcolm III’s remarkable late namesake.