News

03 Jul 2001
Highland Council to Lead Gaelic Virtual Village Project
The Highland Council is to lead an Internet project aimed at preserving Gaelic culture by making it accessible both to the small and scattered communities of the Highlands and Islands and to virtual visitors across the globe.

Through its Library Services, the Council has been awarded £900,000 from the New Opportunities Fund, a lottery "good cause" distributor, to digitise cultural, heritage and language-related material and promote participation in Gaelic. Interactive elements will include special features to make it fun for children to use.

In creating Am Baile, the virtual Gaelic village, the Council will be working in partnership with Taigh Chearsabhagh Trust and West Highland Animation and receiving support from Argyll and Bute Council, Comunn na Gaidhlig, the UHI Millennium Institute, Highlands and Islands Enterprise and the Ross and Cromarty Wayfarers Project.

Mr Stuart Brownlee, Head of Libraries and Archives at The Highland Council, said: "This excellent award from the New Opportunities Fund recognises the strength, excitement and importance of our vision to provide innovative global access to some of the key collections of Gaelic and Highland heritage, culture and language. It will significantly enhance access to the world of the Gael.

"The £900,000 awarded marks a ground-breaking impetus for our ideas, and gives the consortium the best possible beginning to what will be a long-term programme of digitisation that will secure our heritage in an on-line environment and provide surrogate access on a worldwide scale to the life and times, past and present, of the Gaidhealtachd (the Scottish Highlands and Islands). This award contributes significantly to fuelling the learning revolution in the Highlands and Islands."

He said the site would enable bi-lingual access to on-line material such as school log books, maps, Highland photographic archive and Highland Folk Museum sound recordings.

Am Baile was established with initial funding from the New Opportunities Fund and is now funded by The Highland Council and managed as part of Highland Libraries.

Copyright Images may be downloaded from Am Baile for personal use, and for non-commercial educational purposes such as in a classroom or teaching environment, or for private research. For any other use of images, such as in a publication or on a publicly available website, copyright clearance must be obtained. Please contact us and we will refer you to the relevant copyright owner.

We believe we have the owner's permission to publish images we know are in copyright. If you think we have inadvertently used your copyright material without permission, please contact us.

Design and Technology by Precedent