Using the archive - A' cleachdadh na tasglainn
The 250 or so documents accessible in pdf format within the archive section of this website represent an extensive selection of Angus Macleod's writings, together with a limited quantity of other material. Only a fraction of the content of the physical archive, much of which consists of material collected by Angus rather than written by him, is featured.
Some of the pdf files are illustrated, but the majority consist only of text. In addition, two sections are devoted to photographs (as downloadable jpeg files) and one to audio recordings (as downloadable mp3 files). A pdf reader, which can be obtained free of charge from the web, is required to read the text files. The files are made available for downloading on the understanding that they are only to be reproduced for the purposes of the user's private research. If you wish to reproduce any of them, in whole or in part, for any other purpose, please contact the Archive.
We have not sought to present Angus's writings in their entirety on the website. During the course of his life, he returned to the same topics again and again. He elaborated and expanded on existing essays to create others; he merged parts of different documents to create new ones; and he summarised information he had already compiled to create shorter pieces. The physical documents are all available for consultation at Ravenspoint, but for the purpose of the website we have been selective. While overlap between different documents has not been eliminated - far from it, in fact - we have attempted to ensure that where we present multiple documents covering the same theme, the differences are sufficiently important to justify reading all of them.
The archive is divided into sections and subsections. While this structure was devised by us, it does, to a considerable extent, reflect Angus's own classification of his material. However, it is important to stress that his writings are wide-ranging, and the content of the different documents and sections may overlap more than the file names and section titles would suggest. Visitors to the website who are interested in a particular subject would therefore do well to explore several different sections with the aid of the search facility. That said, certain sections, such as 'Calbost: Places and Place-names' or 'The Scottish Crofters Union', are more or less self-contained. Note that the website search facility returns only a list of documents within which the search term appears; a separate search tool, as found within most pdf readers, is required to search within the files themselves.
In preparing material for presentation on the website, we have made a minimum of changes to Angus's own words, though we have taken more liberties with formatting and punctuation in the interests of consistency and clarity. It may be worth emphasising that in documents written in Gaelic, and in renderings of Gaelic personal names and place-names, Angus's orthography often deviates from the currently accepted standard, as might be expected given that he received no formal education in Gaelic. In the case of nouns, for instance, an (apparent) nominative form may appear where a genitive would be expected-but this is not necessarily an accurate guide to how he would have pronounced the word(s) in question.
In order to reduce overlap, we have omitted parts of some documents. We have also devised our own names for some of the files in order to give the reader a clear idea of their content within the context of the website. The file names also appear as headers within the file themselves, where they are placed in square brackets if they differ in more than minor detail from the original document title. Square brackets are also used for occasional editorial insertions within a document.
The reference information at the foot of the document includes the original title and indicates whether part of the original document has been omitted. It also cross-references the file with the document's location within the physical archive at Ravenspoint, and with the National Register of Archives for Scotland's catalogue of the archive (http://www.nas.gov.uk/onlineRegister/). Note that a given document may be stored within the physical archive in more than one location-for example, where handwritten, typed and photocopied versions exist-but only one of these is referenced. Also, some material has been added or re-classified since the catalogue was compiled, and thus the referencing information may be incomplete in a few instances. Finally, for a minority of documents, a date of creation is specified; however, the majority of Angus's writings are undated.
