Celebrating Volunteers Week

We’re celebrating Volunteer Week (1st - 7th June) at SMC as we hear from some of our amazing volunteers and what they have been up to.

The Archive team at SMC began recruiting volunteers again in September 2025 and so far they’ve contributed nearly 200 hours towards vital archive tasks. This has been a massive help which we are very grateful for. The team have been helping to transcribe, reorder items, digitise, catalogue and list documentation and have all learnt some new skills along the way. 

We are currently at full capacity with our volunteers and not taking on any new roles, however if you would like to be added to our waiting list please do get in touch. 

Over to our some of our volunteers to hear more about what they’ve been doing:

‘I’ve really loved getting to know all the other volunteers and the team at the Scottish Music Centre! It’s also been really cool to work with all the material in the archive. I love looking at all the CDs and learning more about Scottish music history! I’ve also learnt so much more about the ins and outs of archive work.’  (Tabitha)

‘I’ve enjoyed listening and helping recover archive material, such as transcribing, summarising and dating and cataloguing is always interesting and enjoyable. And I have finally learned how to catalogue audio materials properly! In academic things I wrote, I just treated them all like textual citations, and threw them together into one list. Shocking, I know.’ (Ken)

‘Working with the SMC has brought me to working with some especially fine people and I’ve appreciated greatly their attention to detail. My learning from this includes the importance of thoroughness, as that which is important may not at first be apparent until we dig that bit deeper to find it. I’m also impressed by the SMC’s breadth of coverage in archiving, for example, musical scores as well as audio materials’ (John)

‘It’s been really interesting learning a lot more about music from genres I wouldn’t normally listen to, I have a weird amount of very vague information about a few musicians I didn’t even know of 2 hours before finding out about them. Digitising has been really fun there’s been times where I’m listening to studio session demos and I realise I’m probably one of very few people to hear this so it feels sort of special in a way. I can catalogue absolutely anything now in far too much detail. It's great, I really want to learn how to digitise more mediums. I’ve been really loving that. It feels great knowing I’m helping preserve something and making sure it will always stay real.’ (Dylan)

Find out more about Volunteers Week

Volunteering in the Archives

We are currently at capacity for volunteers, however please do get in touch if you would like to register interest for any future opportunities.

We have a number of volunteering opportunities in the Scottish Music Centre’s archives. If you are interested in gaining experience working within an archive and music centre, we’d love to hear from you!

We’re excited to hear about your interests and skills, and how they can support the sustainability and accessibility of our archive. Below are some of the areas of our work that volunteers can engage with:

• Cataloguing scores, recordings and books

• Reshelving and numbering within our onsite-storage

• Digitising audio from a range of analogue formats including cassette, vinyl, reel-to-reel and minidisc

• Digitising scores from our archives

• Conducting research on composers represented in our archive to assist in creating finding tools for external researchers

• Typesetting scores from manuscripts using Sibelius to create performance editions