Hansard

I am delighted to contribute to this debate on the digital future of Scotland’s heritage.

From my perspective, as a computer science graduate from the University of Strathclyde—in the 1980s, let us say—I can tell Parliament that the technological advances in hardware and software in the past few decades have been incredible and have brought us to the rich place in which we find ourselves today.

Thirty or so years ago there were no PCs, no laptops, no internet and no mobiles, and few, if any, digitised resources. The microcomputer revolution was just about to start and the capabilities of the early machines were pretty limited.

I recall bringing a microcomputer home from work one day. It took both me and my brother to lift it out of the car into the house. When I plugged it in, all it could do was run an old word processor, the name of which I have long since forgotten. Graphics? A graphics circuit board was needed for that, and it did not work.

Back then, using that kind of technology to provide resource material for our schools was a challenge for the creative skills of the talented software engineers of the day, and for the teachers, who were all a bit bemused by the microcomputer revolution.

However, as far as I am concerned that was the start of the technology revolution that has delivered so many benefits to us now and has provided such an incredible library of digitised resources.

I visited the Parliament’s education centre yesterday and saw the amazing resources there. When I saw the scanner equipment that is used to digitise our heritage sites, I was reminded of its ancient equivalent dating back to the 1970s. Picture a book about Rome, with colour pictures of the ruins showing the Colosseum, the Forum and so on. To see those buildings as they were, we had to flip a laminated page with illustrations of the missing bits of the buildings drawn on it and then superimpose that over the original page to see the buildings in their former glory. That was a popular way of illustrating ancient sites, and I suppose it was the best technology of its day. I still have the book.

I was wondering why the staff from the Scottish ten were showing the cover of Deep Purple’s “In Rock” album from 1970, until I realised that, as the minister mentioned, Mount Rushmore had been digitised, too. I am sure that my colleagues will tell us more about the Scottish ten during the debate, and I look forward to that.

One of the other jewels in our digital crown is the advances that have been made in providing access to ScotlandsPeople’s records. Anyone who has seen “Who Do You Think You Are?”, which was mentioned by Patricia Ferguson, cannot fail to have been impressed by the stories of those who have embarked on a journey to discover their family history and origins. I am no different.

I had the great pleasure of visiting the Burns monument centre in Kilmarnock, which has a fantastic genealogy centre where I was able to track down my own ancestors, with the help of the centre staff and my colleague Councillor Hugh Ross, an acknowledged expert in that field. Even within the current limitations of the service being provided to my local authority at the moment, it was a great joy to discover that my great-great-great-grandfather was one Timothy Coffey, born circa 1815 in County Tipperary in Ireland.

The potential is incredible. The fact that there are so many ScotlandsPeople’s records—of births, baptisms, marriages, wills and testaments, deaths and indeed poor law records—is astonishing. I am told that there are about 80 million records online now. Our new body, the National Records of Scotland, is in the privileged position of being the custodian of the history of our people. Immediately, our past becomes our present and we can, in a real sense, bring our ancestors back with us to discover who they were—and who we are.

It is estimated that between 28 million and 40 million people around the world claim direct Scottish ancestry. In America alone, in the 2000 census almost 5 million people reported having Scottish ancestors. Incredibly, that figure rose to 20 million when people cited partial Scottish descent.

The huge potential of that resource for tourism in Scotland is there for all to see. With careful planning, and by opening up visitor opportunities at our genealogy archives, we can plan to develop a new industry from the culture and heritage that our ancestors have left behind for us.

However, we have to ensure that all our data is available, at an affordable price, to all our genealogy centres. I suggest that the recent proposal by the National Records of Scotland to charge about £1,000 per computer to access our own data is unreasonable. I hope that the minister will review that proposal, given the level of investment already made in places such as Kilmarnock.

We have come a long way from the early days that I described, when I was fortunate enough to be involved in the development of digital technologies and resources. Scotland has a mass of data and knowledge about our country and people, and we must share that resource with the world for everyone’s benefit. It may well be a long, long way to Tipperary, but from the genealogy centre in Kilmarnock, it was only a short journey for me—and a few clicks on a PC—to discover my own family’s origins.

I commend the Scottish Government’s initiatives in this area and all the digital innovations that we are about to see. I am delighted to support the Government’s motion.

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