This is for a case study I'm putting together about the Ballast Trust and its contribution to Scottish business archives for the National Strategy and I wanted to find out more details about the work to sort, (occasionally rescue) and catalogue the records.

I had already seen the pictures from that time and put them up on the blog here but reading through the letters and some of the figures involved has added to my understanding of the scale of the project - in the first 6 months alone 45 tons of records came through the door. Rather helpfully, there are also the notes from a talk Bill give in December 1988 which outline the whole process of how the Ballast Trust got involved and the different stages to the job.

You also get a great sense of the kind of man Bill was - in response to a letter from Trafalgar House who state that they hope to appoint a "Divisional Archives Manager who will be responsible among other things for the archives of the RGC and of the Scott Lithgow yard on the Clyde", Bill writes that the sooner the Scottish Record Office, the Ballast Trust and Scott Lithgow get "our show in place the better - even divisional archives managers will need guidance!"

This will all help make the case study more interesting I hope and it will appear in due course here.