Digitising Scotland

This project aims to digitise the 24 million vital events record images (births, marriages and deaths) for all people in Scotland since 1855 (ie transcribe them into machine encoded text). This will allow research access to individual level information on some 18 million individuals, a large proportion of those who have ever lived in Scotland between 1855 to the present day. At the moment these records are kept as indexed images. This means that to extract any data, a researcher must search for an individual record by name and then manually transcribe the information they need themselves (eg cause of death, occupation etc.); this of course makes any large scale research impossible. A one off investment would mean that these records could made available for major population research.

This dataset will be prepared for linkage to existing longitudinal studies, primarily the Scottish Longitudinal Study (SLS), and more generally to the already highly developed Scottish health informatics systems. This will allow the characteristics (place of birth, age at marriage, occupation, longevity, cause of death etc) of parents, grandparents and other relatives of those followed by the SLS to be analysed and will therefore enhance contemporary Scottish and UK health datasets, health informatics systems, longitudinal datasets and genetic studies. People surviving to have children, grandchildren and other descendents are unlikely to be fully representative of the historic population of Scotland, and the complete transcription will importantly enable a complete linkage exercise between the different to create full or partial life histories for all those experiencing vital events in Scotland since 1855.This will mean that for the first time the UK will have a data system of a similar potential depth and breadth as the Scandinavian and Low countries, whose population registers provide such life histories, with countries, where work such as those using "The Demographic Database" at Umeá University, Sweden; the "Historical Population Registers" Project at the Norwegian Historical Data Centre, University of Tromso, Norway and the Historical Sample of the Netherlands, based at the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, Netherlands is currently extending knowledge of demography as well as economic and social history over the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth century. Such a dataset will bring the possibility of exploring the condition of the present Scottish population within the context of their families through multiple generations of micro-data.

This project will not involved the production of research output, although it will play an important role in maximising the impact of outputs of projects by researchers using dataset produced (see Pathways to Impact). However in other parts of the application, we have outlined how the data may be used. From this it is possible to identify research areas that this data will support and therefore potential beneficiaries. There will of course be many ways that innovative researchers will use this data, that we cannot yet envisage.

Those working in Social policy will benefit from a deeper understanding:
- of social mobility across 150 years
- the impact of a developing welfare state
- the nature of industrialisation and its impact on populations
- of fertility

Those working in Educational policy will have an insight into
- the impact of changing educational policy over 150

Those working in public health will come to better understand
- the effect of food shortages for mothers during pregnancy on the later life (intergenerational) health of the child
- the impact of urbanisation and severe environmental insults - on health
- the long-term effect of serious viruses (eg the 1918 influenza pandemic) on the surviving population

Those working in the NHS
- will benefit potentially from better family history risk assessment tools
- will more easily be able to produce genealogies in support of clinical genetic counselling services
- will benefit from refinement to genetic studies that will be gained from extensive pedigrees, this is likely to be a substantial impact

The public
- the Scottish public will benefit from the enhancements to their healthcare system
- may very directly benefit from enhancements to the genetic cancer counselling service and family history as used in clinical practise
- they will also benefit from the added attractiveness to researchers across many sectors - including the biomedical field - of the enhanced data environment that exists in Scotland and that will be enhanced with the dataset.