Memories
Since 2021, the University of Edinburgh's Heritage Collections team have been working alongside the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland to create an archive for RZSS.
Using material from the RZSS archive, this exhibition tells the story of how RZSS and Edinburgh Zoo was founded, the work that has gone into making this collection accessible and some of the stories from the archives and those who contribute to RZSS today.
Explore the archiveThe archives of the RZSS were spread across the Edinburgh Zoo site in cupboards, basements and drawers. It was a big task bringing everything together!
Archivists uncovered photographs, letters, artworks, newspaper cuttings, publications, annual reports, administrative records, animal records and more.
Items of historical importance were brought to the University of Edinburgh's Heritage Collections on George Square where they are kept in secure, climate-controlled stores.
5500 photographs have been taken of fragile photographs and selected documents from the RZSS archive.
592 glass plate negatives have been made into positive digital images making the images easier to see for the first time in 100 years!
The archive holds:
- Over 130,000 letters
- A huge audio-visual collection of over 9000 photographs, over 700 historic glass plate photographs and roughly 40 old film reels dating from 1912-1999
- Guidebooks and annual reports dating back to 1910
- Animal records showing arrivals, births, deaths and departures of all animals at the RZSS since 1913
For more than 100 years, moments in the zoo have become stories to share and treasured memories to pass down.
Make your own treasured memories at Edinburgh Zoo today.
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