Digitising Scotland
Visit the Digitising Scotland website
The University of Edinburgh Longitudinal Study Centre – Scotland (LSCS) received funding from the ESRC to create a multidisciplinary research database from historical vital events records. The Digitising Scotland (DS) project is digitising up to 24 million Scottish vital events record images (births, marriages and deaths) dating back to 1856. This will allow research access to individual-level information on some 18 million individuals – a large proportion of those who have lived in Scotland since 1856. Prior to Digitising Scotland these records were kept as indexed images accessible from Scotland’s People, but this meant that to extract data for research projects a researcher must first search for an individual record by name, and then manually transcribe the information they needed (eg cause of death, occupation, etc). This made any large-scale research project impossible – a situation that the Digitising Scotland project will change.
Work Packages
The project contains 4 work packages:
- Digitising birth, marriages and death vital events records from 1856 to 1973.
- Standardising and coding occupation descriptions to the Historical International Standard Classification of Occupations (HISCO).
- Standardising and coding all deaths to International Classification of Disease – 10 (ICD-10).
- Linking address information to consistent geographies through time.
Visit the Digitising Scotland website
