Overview

The GASHE project, which began in November 1999 and ended in October 2002, was based at the University of Glasgow and funded by the Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP). It was designed to open up the outstanding collections of records produced by Higher Education Institutions in Scotland and to make them fully accessible on the web via an integrated gateway.

Previously, collections were only partially catalogued and many others provided inadequate descriptions. Now, GASHE provides descriptions to recognised international standards of a variety of educational, intellectual and cultural resources, and allows seamless searching of archive and manuscript collections across ten higher educational institutions in Scotland. It enables subject and functional guided navigation as well as providing value added biographical and institutional access points.

Additional funding was made available by the Arts and Humanities Research Council for a project, entitled ‘Developing archival context standards for functions in the higher education sector’ to continue and develop the innovative research begun by GASHE into the potential impact of a functional approach to archival description. The project started on 1 August 2003 and will run until 28 February 2006. Over 200 descriptions of the functions and activities performed by the Scottish Higher Education Institutions from the fifteenth century to the present day have been added to those previously available on the GASHE site.

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