Intangible Cultural Heritage in Scotland

In 2008, a team from Edinburgh Napier University, funded by Museums Galleries Scotland, undertook a scoping and mapping exercise in order to evaluate how a project to record Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) in Scotland would look. The full report can be found here.

Edinburgh Napier University has been awarded a substantial Knowledge Transfer Fellowship grant from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to bring the report's recommendations to fruition. The primary outcome of the project, funded primarily by the AHRC, and utilising the knowledge and expertise of Local Authorities across Scotland, will be the establishment of an online inventory of Scotland’s ICH, taking the form of a customised wiki.

This will record and preserve the aspects of Scotland’s culture that do not easily fit into museum collections. The data will be collected and inputted into the main database by teams across Scotland and will provide a valuable record of ICH, as it is currently practiced, and will be practiced in the future, across Scotland. The database is designed not to be a record of ICH at a given moment, but, rather, to be dynamic, in a way that mirrors its subject matter. ICH, on account of its nature, evolves in form over time, and the database must be of a form that is able to adequately capture this.

For more information, visit the Intangible Cultural Heritage in Scotland website at http://ichscotland.org.