Digital PR: RCAHMS
RCAHMS: Launch of Canmore 'Live'
RCAHMS (the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland) is the national archive of images and other materials pertaining to Scotland’s built history. In August 2009 it launched a web facility for members of the public to upload their own images to its digital archive, or to add their own additional text entries to the digital collection of more than 280,000 images.
What we did
The web-based nature of the initiative saw pagoda target websites and bloggers that had a particular interest in either Scottish heritage and/or photography. By contacting them directly via email with details of the Canmore website, a number of them were sufficiently interested to ‘seed’ out the information to their audience.
This 3rd party endorsement proved effective, working alongside a media push to Scottish-interest magazines, history titles and cultural media, using selected images from the photographic archives.
Did it work?
The combination of ‘hands-on’ archive with high quality images garnered national coverage in publications such as the Daily Record and Mirror and a lengthy Press Association feature. The release was particularly popular with ancestry and history websites and blogs, such as ScottishAncestryBlog, UrbanRealm, History Today, Heritage-key.com, ResearchBuzz, Scottish Architecture and Current Archaeology, to name a few.
In the first month of going live, there were more than 400 images added and around 100 text entries. Six months later the number of images has increased to just under 5000, with some members of the public using the archive as the ideal public storage for quite large photo collections.
