2019 GIG Lifetime Achievement Award: Fiona Laing

Fiona Laing, Official Publications Curator at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh was this year's recipient of the GIG Lifetime Achievement Award.

I am delighted to be the recipient of this year’s GIG Lifetime Achievement Award. I was doubly proud as it came on the back of receiving the CILIP Scotland Library and Information Professional of the Year Award for 2019.

I served on the GIG committee in 2016-17 sharing the role of promoting the group via social media. I continue in a minor capacity now as GIG’s Standing Committee on Official Publications (SCOOP) liaison rep. As the Acting Chair of SCOOP I feel that it is important that the two groups are aware of each other’s work and possibilities for collaboration. SCOOP is a subgroup of the CILIP’s Knowledge and Information Group and so I also have some involvement with their activities too. I am Chair of the Scottish Working Forum on Official Publications (SWOP) having joined its Business Committee in 2004. This Group is affiliated to SCURL. The Group is thriving, with an active online and social media presence, holding regular meetings, engaging speakers and arranging relevant training for members.

The majority of my career has been spent working with government information in the form of Official Publications. As the Official Publications Curator at the National Library of Scotland I am responsible for the development, curation and promotion of all of the Library’s official publications collections. These consist of around 2 million items from the UK Parliaments and Assemblies, Government Agencies, NDPBs, International Organisations (i.e. FAO, OECD, WHO) and the governments of India, Pakistan, Australia. The National Library of Scotland has United Nations Depository Library status and is the most comprehensive and most authoritative resource in Scotland for official publications. 

As a Legal Deposit Library the National Library can request and receive free of charge a copy of everything published in the United Kingdom, providing they make a request in writing within a year of the date of publication. On the 6 April 2013, regulations were introduced by the UK Parliament to permit each legal deposit library to claim and receive publications in an electronic format. However, this must be by agreement and the default format remains print until such time as an agreement is reached. As the majority of official publications are now produced only in electronic format an important part of my role has been to set up and monitor agreements with government departments to deposit their material electronically.

An effective step in the promotion of the collection and encouraging wider public engagement is digitisation. Once I have selected material I then liaise with many different teams across the library to consider the condition of the material, the copyright status, required metadata, the arrangement of the publications and ensure that we have the right equipment required for the digitisation. 

Some examples of Official Publications that have already been digitised are

The Medical History of British India  This resource provides an entry into the history of disease and its prevention in 19th and 20th-century British India, including veterinary medicine and animal husbandry.

British Military Lists – lists of British Officers serving in the forces during the periods of both world wars which are of great interest for family history research.

The Britain Handbook – this annual reference book, produced originally by the Central Office of Information, provides a factual overview of the United Kingdom and was an important element of the information service provide by British diplomatic posts. This was digitised as part of our Back to the Future: 1979-1989 web feature. We are in the process of digitising our entire collection of this title from 1954-2005.  

League of Nations – forerunner of the United Nations. This is the latest collection to be realised to coincide with the centenary of the founding of the League. 

And finally the project I am most proud of - The Scottish School Exam papers 1888-1963 digitised papers and creative resits. We will be releasing more of our Scottish exam papers collection early in 2020.  You can read more about this project in the latest copy of K&IM Refer Autumn 2019.  These digitised collections will also be made available on the Library’s new Data Foundry. This presents Library collections as data in a machine-readable format, widening the scope for digital research and analysis.

The potential for research and reuse within the OP collections is only limited by the resources at our disposal and our imaginations.

Fiona Laing