Welcome To The Ballast Trust
Welcome to the website of the Ballast Trust.
The Ballast Trust is a charity that provides a rescue, sorting and cataloguing service for business archives with an emphasis on technical records such as shipbuilding, railway and engineering plans, drawings and photographs.
Since its establishment in 1988 it has processed technical records on behalf of national and local archive repositories and museums. From 2014 it has been home to the Business Archives Surveying Officer for Scotland, a role established in 1977 to survey and safeguard business archive collections.
Records at Risk
Centre for Contemporary Arts: we’re actively working with Glasgow Life and Creative Scotland to ensure the Third Eye Centre and CCA Archive remains in the city, and is complete, protected and available to researchers and the wider public.
The Ballast Trust has been working for more than 30 years to help preserve the records of Scotland’s industrial past.
We work with the Business Archives Surveying Officer to monitor and respond to records at risk cases. Please contact us if you have concerns and find out more about current cases.
The Ballast Trust policy statement sets out our aims and the terms under which we can process records on behalf of other record repositories.
The Ballast Trust has championed the preservation and cataloguing of technical records since 1988 and has developed guidance on understanding technical records for others.
The Ballast Trust relies on the work of knowledgeable, enthusiastic and dedicated volunteers. Without them we would not be able to understand collections and catalogue them to the same level of detail.
Although the Ballast Trust is not a collecting archive it does have three collections which it has inherited from William Lind. These are the Lind collection, the Dan McDonald collection and the Thomas McLaren collection.
Our Services
The Ballast Trust provides a range of services for archivists, businesses and researchers to support the management and use of business archives. We are also home to the Business Archives Surveying Officer for Scotland.