Scran is a
Scottish online resource for educational use by the public,
school
A school is an educational institution designed to provide learning spaces and learning environments for the teaching of students under the direction of teachers. Most countries have systems of formal education, which is sometimes compuls ...
s,
further education
Further education (often abbreviated FE) in the United Kingdom and Ireland is education in addition to that received at secondary school, that is distinct from the higher education (HE) offered in universities and other academic institutions. I ...
and
higher education
Higher education is tertiary education leading to award of an academic degree. Higher education, also called post-secondary education, third-level or tertiary education, is an optional final stage of formal learning that occurs after completi ...
. It presents nearly 490,000 (still and moving) images and sounds contributed by
museum
A museum ( ; plural museums or, rarely, musea) is a building or institution that cares for and displays a collection of artifacts and other objects of artistic, cultural, historical, or scientific importance. Many public museums make these ...
s,
galleries,
archive
An archive is an accumulation of historical records or materials – in any medium – or the physical facility in which they are located.
Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or ...
s and the
media
Media may refer to:
Communication
* Media (communication), tools used to deliver information or data
** Advertising media, various media, content, buying and placement for advertising
** Broadcast media, communications delivered over mass el ...
. It was established as an educational charity in 1996 and is now part of Historic Environment Scotland, a registered
charity
Charity may refer to:
Giving
* Charitable organization or charity, a non-profit organization whose primary objectives are philanthropy and social well-being of persons
* Charity (practice), the practice of being benevolent, giving and sharing
* Ch ...
and non-departmental government body.
General description
Scran works in partnership with over 300 cultural institutions in Scotland and the rest of the UK who contribute material to the online service. The online learning resource service hosts nearly 490,000 images, movies and sounds from museums, galleries, archives and the media. Subscribers can download and reuse these for personal and educational use in accordance with the subscriber licence. The online service also provides a range of tools for users "to do stuff with things they find". A number of institutions use Scran's
open source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...
online tool - Scran-in-a-Box - to provide access to their own data.
Organisational structure
Until 2008, Scran was a stand-alone charity. From 2008 to 2015 it was managed by The
(RCAHMS), and had two arms: The Scran Trust, a charitable arm that provided educational access to its records, and Scran Ltd., its wholly owned trading arm. In October 2015, RCAHMS merged with Historic Scotland to form a new body,
Historic Environment Scotland
Historic Environment Scotland (HES) ( gd, Àrainneachd Eachdraidheil Alba) is an executive non-departmental public body responsible for investigating, caring for and promoting Scotland's historic environment. HES was formed in 2015 from the mer ...
, and Scran likewise followed and merged into Historic Environment Scotland.
Background information
Formation
Scran was formed in 1996, and its founding partners were The
National Museums of Scotland
National Museums Scotland (NMS; gd, Taighean-tasgaidh Nàiseanta na h-Alba) is an executive non-departmental public body of the Scottish Government. It runs the national museums of Scotland.
NMS is one of the country's National Collections, ...
, The
,
Museums Galleries Scotland
Museums Galleries Scotland, formerly the Scottish Museums Council, is the National Development Body for the museum sector in Scotland. It offers support to 400 museums and galleries, ranging from small local museums to larger regional and natio ...
and, by invitation, the
Scottish Consultative Council on the Curriculum.
Initial work
In its first five years, it engaged in a wide-ranging scheme of grant awards which allowed cultural organisations to digitise parts of their collections to be made available for educational purposes. This was
Millennium Commission
The Millennium Commission, a United Kingdom public body, was set up to celebrate the turn of the millennium. It used funding raised through the UK National Lottery to assist communities in marking the close of the second millennium and celebra ...
funded through the UK Lottery. It developed an advanced licensing system, commended by many, in which the institution retained ownership of the digitised assets, but made these available under licence to Scran. There followed further large grant aid partner projects with NOF Digitise funding through the
National Library of Scotland
The National Library of Scotland (NLS) ( gd, Leabharlann Nàiseanta na h-Alba, sco, Naitional Leebrar o Scotland) is the legal deposit library of Scotland and is one of the country's National Collections. As one of the largest libraries in the ...
.
Recent work
Scran continues to add records to its database from institutions and individuals. Technical innovations include "Create" functions that allow user creation of instant documents, the ability for users to save their favourite records to a password-protected "Stuff" account and share these with other Scran users, mapping functions and enhanced cross searching such as
SRU SRU may refer to:
Organizations
* Salve Regina University, Newport, Rhode Island, US
* Scottish Rugby Union
* Shri Rawatpura Sarkar University, Chhattisgarh, India
* Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania, US
* Sri Ramachandra University, Chennai ...
/
SRW.
Technical details
Scope
The service hosts nearly 490,000 resources with additional educational materials and delivers a peak of 1.1 million hits per day.
Software and hardware
Scran utilises open source software and runs on a cluster server configuration with
MySQL
MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database o ...
and
PHP
PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group ...
under
Linux
Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...
. The searchable database is over 7
GB and total storage including all assets is over 5
TB. A number of additional websites are hosted as linked services.
Scran-in-a-Box
The whole system developed by Scran including ScranBase and all the tools like Create and Stuff is available for others to use as Scran-in-a Box. The National Museums Scotland Collections Database, the Scottish Stained Glass Trust, the William Wallace Website,
The
Virtual Hamilton Palace Trust and
Robert Gordon University
Robert Gordon University, commonly called RGU, is a public university in the city of Aberdeen, Scotland. It became a university in 1992, and originated from an educational institution founded in the 18th century by Robert Gordon (philanthropist), ...
use "Scran-in-a-Box" tool.
References
External links
*
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Archives in Scotland
History websites of the United Kingdom
Charities based in Scotland
Educational organisations based in Scotland
Scottish culture
Museum organizations
Book publishing companies of Scotland