Digitisation & Licensing

More information about copying and digitisation services.

Heritage Collections work with the Cultural Heritage Digitisation Service (CHDS) to provide a comprehensive range of digitisation options, depending on your needs and the collection-type. You can find more detailed information about the work of CHDS, including technical equipment and recent projects, on their webpages.

We have several options for digital access to our Heritage Collections. These depend on your use and re-use needs. Some services are offered free of charge and some incur charges. We may need time to investigate if there are any Data Protection or Copyright considerations and/or if the item is suitable for digitisation; some items may be too fragile.

Images

If you are undertaking private research and cannot access our materials in person, we can: 

  • Offer you a Virtual Reading Room appointment (live, online viewing of collections items) 

  • Take up to 20 low-quality scans/photographs (quick snaps taken by our team members)  

If you require further copies or images of our collections, we can: 

  • Organise scanning at £0.60 per A4 page (plus VAT) – suitable for private use only  

  • Organise high quality photography at £8.00 per A4 page (plus VAT) – suitable for publication. 

Audio Visual Media

Existing Digital Content

Before contacting us about remote access and digitisation, you can visit our image repository to see if we have already digitised the material. 

Existing High Quality Digital Images

Images on our website have various use and re-use availabilities and restrictions; non-commercial research use is fine, but publication or broadcast would require further permissions. 

Downloading images: you can download most images from our catalogue by clicking on the image and then selecting the ‘Export’ button in the top right corner. Images are available in various file sizes. If this option is not available, it may be because this image falls under Protected Access. In this instance, please submit this permissions form for more information. 

Existing image orders: if you have found the image you need in our image catalogue, but it is not available to download at a sufficiently high resolution for your purposes, we can provide a larger file through an existing image order. Once you have submitted your request via the permissions form, we aim to send the images within 20 working days. 

Mediahopper: Moving image works within from our art collections are available to view via the University’s Mediahopper site. 

Tobar an Dualchais: around a third of our sound archives from the School of Scottish Studies are available online via this site. You can use the advanced search feature to filter search results to just those from the School of Scottish Studies. The tracks on TaD are short extracts of much longer tape recordings. If you would like to listen to the whole tape, listen to recordings not on TaD, receive copies of the recordings, or to reuse the material in any way, please get in touch via HeritageCollections@ed.ac.uk.

FAQs

Images from the University of Edinburgh collections are regularly featured in academic articles, major publications, webpages and TV programmes.