After an incredible turnout to the winners' announcement on the 28th of August 2024, brought to you straight from the ARA Conference in Birmingham, we are very pleased to spread the news of this year's three grant winners!
Every year we receive a phenomenal response to the grant and this year saw an unprecedented level of downloads and submissions. The standard, as always, was incredibly high and the competition fierce. Our judges have come to expect that they will be faced with a huge challenge, as well as having the privilege of discovering so many incredible and diverse collections that, together, contribute towards the UK’s unrivalled and proud cultural heritage. The grant’s judges are always very grateful to have the opportunity to read each and every application and it is clear that a lot of hard work goes into writing them. But, of course, there can only be three winners. So who are they? Watch our recorded winners announcement to find out:
Below we have prepared an introduction to each of our successful organisations and a brief overview of their project:
Royal College of Surgeons of England
This project will bring the diary of a gravedigger who sold bodies to anatomists, the patient records of 18th century female patients and the petition requesting the RCS admit women to a wide audience.
The project will engage with new audiences and reveal some of the hidden history of women in society with compelling evidence and will be compared to present-day parallels.
It's a well-conceived project highlighting significant material.
A huge congratulations to the Royal College of Surgeons of England from all of us!
Museum of Scottish Railways
This project will reveal the hidden history of women and the family in railway culture and open access to the material to the wider community.
Previous digitisation projects have tended to focus on the professional operation and the men who ran it and have skimmed over the social networks that supported them. This project will give the public access to a unique, previously unseen family archive that reveals railway community life in all its vibrant diversity.
Documenting homes on the rails across Scotland, it is full of detail to engage the general user and is key to understanding the social role of women on Scotland’s railways in the mid-20th Century.
Created and informally curated by the stationmaster’s wife Isobel Horn, it opens a window into the culture and social concerns of railway communities in the pre-Beeching era. Informal snapshots capture daily life in and around stations up and down the country, progressive changes in the built environment, leisure activities such as the camping coach holiday, and mid-century fashion trends.
Congratulations are in order for the Museum of Scottish Railways! We are thrilled to celebrate their success and commend them on their amazing achievement.
St Andrews Botanic Garden Trust
The documents to be digitised represent a record in time from the late 1800s to the present day of the distribution of plant species in the Fife area.
The documents have additional value in that they are still housed with the specimens which they refer to. St Andrews Botanic Garden Trust want to involve local people, students and volunteers to help carry out repeat plant surveys of the areas detailed in these reports to see how distributions have changed – this is vital information, particularly given the increasing impact of climate change.
This written collection is an important record of the status and distribution of species in the local area over a time a period of over 100 years. Given the change in climate and habitat conditions over this time, it provides very valuable biological information which can reveal a huge amount of information which will be made available.
This is a very timely project with outcomes linked to climate change and the distribution of species.
We can't wait to get started on these projects and to tell you ALL about them!
Claiming from the Match Funding Pot?
We wish we could award every single application to the grant because all are truly deserving and worthy of safeguarding and wider opportunities for access, but that is just not possible. Instead, we have brought back the popular Match Funding Pot from last year, available to everyone who has applied.
For every eligible application received, TWA deposited £500 into the Match Funding Pot. Any applicant who has been unsuccessful in securing one of the three main grants is entitled to make a matched claim against the pot for up to £1,000! But, be warned, the pot is very popular and once the funds are gone, they’re gone! Our advice, if you are ready to progress and you have some funds available, don’t delay in making your claim.
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