Tiree and the Tiree Collection

Tiree is an attractive fertile Argyllshire island, some fourteen miles by six, lying beyond Mull and Coll as the outermost of the Inner Hebrides off Scotland's west coast. Its eight hundred inhabitants are mainly involved in crofting, fishing, tourism and local government-based employment. Well-known for its flora and birdlife, it has beautiful sandy beaches etched around most of its circumference and these now attract wind surfers from all over the world.

Part of the Argyll Estate since the seventeenth century, Tiree has held a pivotal position in the history and cultural life of the area. It has long been famed for its poets, both those who offered praise in the households of the Gaelic gentry and those who later had as their patrons the crofters and cottars of the island's thirty townships. The oral culture of the community is rich and varied, passed from one generation to the next in a chain of transmission whose exponents were and are highly valued, as collectors from the School of Scottish Studies found when they began to record there in the early 1950s.

There are now some 500 recordings from Tiree and the descendants of Tiree emigrants in the archives of the School of Scottish Studies. These date from the early 1950s to the 1980s but the bulk were gathered in the course of a special "Tiree Project" instigated by the late Eric Cregeen, Reader in Scottish Ethnology, and carried out by him, assisted by Margaret Mackay, now Director of the School of Scottish Studies, between 1974 and 1983. This sought to build up a picture of the social, economic and cultural life of the island in the 18th and 19th centuries, a period of great change, using oral tradition and testimony as well as documentary and other source material.

The examples from the School's archive chosen for Pròiseact Thiriodh are mainly in Gaelic and reflect the work of pioneering collectors in Tiree from the earliest days of The School of Scottish Studies onwards; Calum Maclean, Hamish Henderson, John MacInnes and Eric Cregeen.

In addition to the material from the School of Scottish Studies a number of BBC Alba Tiree recordings broadcast from the late 1970's onwards, were selected and their content complements that of the School. The inclusion of a variety of material from 2 collections allowed comparisons to be made with regard to linguistic difficulties, cataloguing times, identification of contributors and copyright issues.

For some time the Tiree community through their local heritage organisation has been exploring with the School of Scottish Studies ways of ensuring that the Tiree material in the archive be made available for the enjoyment and education of locals and visitor alike. Pròiseact Thiriodh is a much welcomed first step in addressing these issues.

All indications suggest that those involved in Pròiseact Thiriodh very much enjoyed listening to and learning from the lore of their ancestors and friends.

Community Cataloguing

Pròiseact Thiriodh was underaken in order to address and test the technology, methodology and key issues central to Tobar an Dualchais. This is a £3 million project proposal to conserve by digitisation, and create on-line access to 18,000 hours of Gaelic and Scots sound archive material to the widest possible educational audience.

Pròiseact Thiriodh also responded to a desire from the Tiree and Coll Gaelic Partership to have some hours of material pertaining to the these islands digitised and returned for the education and enjoyment of the local community. The work of the project complements the activities in An Iodhlann of The Tiree Historical Society.

Central to the methodology envisaged for Tobar an Dualchais / Kist o Riches is the desire to have a positive cultural and economic impact in the rural/island where much of the material was originally garnered. This approach recognises the importance of local knowledge and linguistic abilities and the need to create appropriate employment in these often economically fragile localities.

During Pròiseact Thiriodh three members of the of the local community were trained, and employed on a part-time basis between May and September 1999 to catalogue and track 30 hours of BBC Alba and School of Scottish Studies material of Tiree origin. They received an initial training session, on going support and a follow up training session throughout their period of employment. They proved positively the benefits of this approach.

We would like to express our thanks to Josie Brown, Margaret Campbell, Mairi Campbell and Catriona Campbell, who took up the challenge of cataloguing. We would also like to thank Robert Gray who attended our first training session. We must also remember Hector MacPhail who also attended enthusiastically our first training session but was prevented due to illness from commencing employment. Hector sadly passed away in July 1999.

We are very grateful for the support provided by Dr John Holliday and the Tiree and Coll Gaelic Partnership in implementing Pròiseact Thiriodh.

The audio material for this project was provided from the archives of the School of Scottish Studies and BBC Scotland on 1/4" reel-to-reel tape. These recordings had been made at speeds of 3.75 ips, 7.5 ips and 15 ips - sometimes with mixed speeds used on a single tape!

The quality of the audio in these recordings varies, as some were made by staff and students of the School in respondent's households, while others are broadcast quality recordings from the BBC.

Producing the CD-Audio recordings

The following procedure was used to produce the CD-Audio recordings.

Cataloguing the audio content

Creating the metadata

Searching the audio items

Once authenticated, users can search for and display items in the collection and play the associated aidio. This is a two-step process:

1. First, users search on a Verity Search97 index of all the records in the database. This index is rebuilt automatically at regular intervals by a small Cold Fusion application. This search returns a list of items that match the user's query.
2. Second, users select any one of the returned items to display the full record for the item, including the link (URL) that requests the audio file for playing. This is implemtented as a Cold Fusion application that runs an SQL query against the Access database via ODBC and displays the results, building the URL to the audio as required.

Supporting user comments

Users can add comments to be associated with each item's record, and can display the comments made by other users concerning this item. So, for example, a knowledgeable user might suggest an alternative translation of an item, or point out an error in the item's metadata.

Serving the metadata and audio

Further information