Get closer to Aberdeen’s history

Pillbox at the Bridge of Don. Photo (cc) Sharkey.

Aberdeen City Council launched their online SMR yesterday, and it looks like they’ve done a really good job with it. An SMR is a Sites and Monuments Record. Usually whenever anything is found or a site excavated, the local council in the UK will add it to their database, which is the SMR. These used to be physical files, but digitisation has made access via the internet theoretically possible. Despite this it’s not something all councils provide, and to do it properly takes some effort and commitment. If you’re a councilor whose term expires in less that four years then funding a project, where you take the blame for the cost as election time and your successor takes the credit when it comes online, is not an attractive proposition. It’s a shame because if it’s done right it an online SMR can be a very helpful way of accessing local heritage. Aberdeen City Council therefore deserve a round of applause for their new SMR, which is very sexy. For example, above is a Flickr photo of the pillbox at the Bridge of Don, and if you’re a curious individual you can search the SMR to find the entry in the database. Now from a British perspective these could be quite dull sites. There are dozens of them in places all across the UK. Some databases will baldly state the location, condition, who recorded the data and whether there are any images on file. The entry for this pillbox is very different.

The entry starts by mentioning it’s one of five pillboxes on the same beach and then explains why it’s there, to defend against an invasion in the Second World War following the occupation of Norway and Denmark. There’s the note that the pillboxes were connected by anti-tank blocks. Now instead of being a simple box there’s the historical context and I can start to get interested in the site. There’s other helpful stuff like the comment that erosion means that the site isn’t always visible. On the right is the bit I can really get excited about. There’s a box of links titled Associated Records. Again many sites I’ve used haven’t had this kind of link, so if you’re looking for information about a group of sites, you have to know around 80% of the facts you’re looking for before you start. The people working on this really seem to have given serious thought as to how the SMR will be used.

You can leave the fields blank and just select a monument type to search to browse by type. That led me to this entry on Aberdeen’s Castle, which is an extensive entry for a site whose status is listed as Documentary. If the first two lines of an entry are, “Aberdeen’s castle is an elusive affair. It slips in and out of history relatively quickly.” you don’t expect to find dozens more sentences on the state of research.

I did find the Experimental Archaeology site of East Tullos to be surprisingly short. There’s a helpful note in the bibliography as to where you can read more about it, but it’s one of the few places I’ve found where they’ve missed an opportunity, as Ian Ralston’s report in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland is available for free online, via the ADS. As it happens I know the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland is doing an excellent job in making their material available, but it’s probably not a fact at the forefront of Joe Bloggs’s mind.

The other improvement would be to make the small images available via a Creative Commons licence. I can appreciate the commercial sensitivity of the SMR, and the council is clear that it shouldn’t be used for planning applications, but a By, Non-Commercial, No Derivatives licence would have made them available for personal and educational use without losing copyright. This may be partly due to inertia, but the photos have a variety of sources, so you not only have to persuade your own organisation, but also the other organisations which give you access to the images. Until Creative Commons breaks into the mainstream this will remain an administrative problem.

The final problem isn’t something that the council can do anything about. Aberdeenshire is chock-full of fascinating archaeological sites. It’s an extremely rich past from prehistoric times to the modern era. Some of the best stone circles in the UK are found in Aberdeenshire, as are some of the major Pictish sites and these don’t appear in the SMR. This is not entirely surprising as because of the way local government works in the UK, Aberdeen City is a different adminstrative district to Aberdeenshire, which has its own online SMR. The Aberdeenshire interface isn’t bad, but it would be better with photos and associated records.