In 2024/25 Gerard Mooney is working with the Ballast Trust and the Business Archives Surveying Officer on his masters disseration (based at the University of Glasgow’s Information Studies) which explores the role that records surveying can play in engaging the videogames industry in Scotland with their heritage.
This is a placement based disseration and Gerard will be researching how businesses have engaged with their records and heritage through records surveying as a tool. This dissertation will explore whether a surveying methodology can be applied to the videogames industry to engage them with their archives and heritage?
Gerard will contact Scottish videogames companies to offer a free records survey and ask them to complete his dissertation questionnaire about recordkeeping practices and attitudes towards heritage in their organisations.
As the Scottish videogames industry enters its fifth decade of operations and sees the development of a Scottish Government led National Games Strategy, what role is there for heritage in today’s industry? There are examples of business archive and heritage iniativies within the global video games industry, eg Nintendo Museum, the National Videogames Museum in the UK. This dissertation seeks to identify what heritage initiatives are underway within the Scottish videogames sector and are business archive collections being managed by companies today?
Since 1977, business archive surveying in Scotland has helped to engage businesses with their records and heritage, securing business archive collections from a variety of industries. See these testimonies for examples of recent Surveying Officer work.
