{"id":12,"date":"2015-07-13T14:39:26","date_gmt":"2015-07-13T14:39:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.iriss.org.uk\/underthehood\/?p=12"},"modified":"2017-06-29T13:06:35","modified_gmt":"2017-06-29T12:06:35","slug":"preserving-the-history-of-social-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.iriss.org.uk\/underthehood\/2015\/07\/13\/preserving-the-history-of-social-work\/","title":{"rendered":"Preserving the history of social work"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stories from children\u2019s migration<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 2007, IRISS undertook a digital preservation project to share – and safeguard – the migration story of the 10,000 “orphans, waifs and strays” who emigrated to Canada between 1869 and 1939.<\/p>\n

The Golden Bridge<\/a> was first created as a exhibition at the Heatherbank Museum of Social Work<\/a> in Glasgow. \u00a0When the museum\u2019s public exhibition space closed, IRISS worked with the exhibition\u2019s curator and archivist to digitise the photographs, documents and stories and give them a home on the web. In this new format, the Golden Bridge exhibition is protected from age and damage. It\u2019s also become an interactive tool for learning and sharing this migration story – with the ability to provide new ways of seeing this part of Scotland\u2019s history.<\/p>\n

We recently redesigned the\u00a0Golden Bridge website. Why? Back in 2007, the original website wasn\u2019t designed to be responsive, meaning it wasn\u2019t designed to display on mobile phones or tablets. The advent of the Smartphone changed how people accessed the web, and given the growth in popularity of mobile devices, it was considered important to redesign Golden Bridge to ensure it was fit for purpose and continued to reach a wide audience.\u00a0This redesign gives us a good excuse to take the lid off our work and share a \u2018behind-the-scenes\u2019 look at the knowledge and effort\u00a0that went in to digitising this exhibition.<\/p>\n

The Golden Bridge represents the collective effort of our knowledge media and evidence-informed practice teams. It draws on our skills as interactive web developers and designers, as well as our knowledge of digital preservation. \u00a0We learned to build a resource that reflects the visual elements of the 19th century and the interactive web developments of the 21st. We made use of tool called Zoomify<\/a>, typically used for online maps, to enable visitors to zoom in on the detail of these historical photos. \u00a0Documents were scanned to capture the original Narratives of Facts which detailed the work of the Orphan Homes of Scotland and we captured the expert knowledge of the original exhibitions\u2019 curator, Alastair Ramage, to ensure this migration story was not lost.<\/p>\n

This resource draws on the value of stories to understand Scotland\u2019s social services. \u00a0As Alastair Ramage suggests, this is “a story that needs to be told again and again to remind us how easy it is to stigmatise a whole group of vulnerable people – especially children”.<\/p>\n

Listen to our\u00a0IRISS.fm episode<\/a> to\u00a0hear more about ‘how’ we built this resource and what it has meant to us an organisation.<\/p>\n