Filters

Use filters to narrow down your results from a broad search. The filter results are given in order of numbers of hits.

Subject

Key words or themes that have been assigned to descriptions by cataloguers, to help to highlight the main topics the material covers. A collection can never be comprehensively indexed, so subjects should be used as a guide rather than something definite.

Author/Creator

The individual or organization responsible for the making, keeping or collecting the described materials before these were placed in an archive. An archive collection usually come from the same place or source (sometimes called provenance), and therefore a recognised creator or creators. For example, the “creator” of the Papers of Canon Alfred Leslie Lilley is Alfred Leslie Lilley, although he did not author or physically create all the individual items within the collection. The creator of the Hay and Woolfson Upper Clyde Shipbuilders Ephemera Collection is Upper Clyde Shipbuilders Ltd., as they are responsible for the existence of the archive, which was created in the course of the everyday business activities of the company.

Date

The date the archival item or items were created. If you enter a single date. e.g. 1763, the search will also include descriptions with date spans that include your date, e.g. 1680 – 1780.

Level

The level shows if the description you have found relates to a group of items, a series within the group or a single archival item. You can use the level filters

1. Collection: This is the ‘top level’ of description and typically describes a complete group of archival materials, e.g. ‘ Isobel Wylie Hutchison Collection ‘ or ‘Papers of Erwin Finlay Freundlich’. The ‘top level’ may exist on its own, or ‘lower levels’ of the collection, such as series, may also form part of the whole description.
2. Section: This is the ‘middle tier’ between the top level and an individual item level description. Typically it is a series, sub-series or file. The description may or may not then have lower individual item level descriptions.
3. Item: This is typically the lowest level of description. An ‘item’ within an archive typically represents one single physical entity. Sometimes files are described as individual items. This is not an exact science due to the complex nature of archives and the choices made as to how to represent the hierarchy.

Repository

Your Scottish Archives searches across archival items held in many different collections across Scotland. You search within all repositories by default, but the filter allows you to select one or more institutions by name. For each search result you can see the list of repositories that have matching descriptions and the number of descriptions, up to the first 20 institutions.

Digital Content

Enables you to select descriptions that either display images, or provide links to digital content that they describe.

Note that only a small proportion of archives are digital or digitised, and Your Scottish Archives does not always have links if digital content does exist, because the cataloguer has to choose to link to it in the description that we have received from them. The content is held on external sites outside of Your Scottish Archives, so we are not responsible for the maintenance of these links, which may show ‘page not found’ if they are not maintained.

Place

The geographic location of the archival material.

For further help, see our advice on advanced searching and tips on searching.