Research & Student Resources

The primary resources of the museum service are its collections: objects, images and archives. The specific collecting objectives of the museum service are outlined in the Acquisition & Disposal Policies 2007-2012.

Acquisition & Disposal Policies 2007-2012 (pdf 75 kb)

The collections are still in the process of relocation to the HQ building in Mintlaw. The best way of checking what has been relocated to Mintlaw is to look at the museum service’s online catalogue, which is regularly updated.

The collections of objects cover the following subject areas:

Fine and Applied Art

museum display This part of the collections includes Oil Paintings (portraits; maritime paintings; landscapes; still life; artists include G. Fiddes Watt, Sir George Reid, Joseph Farquharson, James Forbes); Water-colours & Drawings (18th-century drawings by James Ferguson and Montague Beattie); and Prints (19th-century landscape views; late 20th-century contemporary prints); as well as Scottish provincial silver from Banff, Peterhead, Ballater and Stonehaven; 19th-century silver prize trophies associated with the Volunteer movement; Sculpture & Ceramics; Furniture & Horology; and Metalwork.

Natural Sciences

There is a very small collection of stuffed animals and birds and some insects, and a significant collection of shells. The geological collections include rocks, minerals & fossils.

Human History

The main groups of this section of the collections are:

Social History (the principal collections here cover: Farming; Fishing; Whaling; local trades and industries; civic, social and domestic material)
Archaeology (principally Neolithic and Bronze Age material – flint implements, beakers and cinerary urns, carved stone balls; also some Early Historic and Mediaeval material)
Arms & Armour (small varied collection of British and foreign firearms, swords and daggers, shot and powder flasks, and armour)
Costume & Textiles (mainly 19th- and early 20th-century ladies’ costume and accessories)
Numismatics (Greek, Roman, English, Scottish & British coins; 18th- and 19th-century commemorative medals; military medals; trade and church tokens)
Ethnography (small collection of Inuit, Chinese & African material)

Photography

This collection holds some 14,000 catalogued images, as glass plate negatives, original photographs, postcards and copy negatives. Over half of this material relates to the Peterhead area.

The glass plate negatives are primarily the Shivas collection from Peterhead and provide a record of the area between about 1860 and 1910. Original photographs and postcards provide a record up to the 1960s supplemented by copy negatives. The recently-acquired Broughall collection (uncatalogued at present) comprises negatives from the Peterhead area during the last two decades of the 20th century.

There are also two large uncatalogued accessions from the Banff area: the Bodie collection of late 19th- and early 20th-century glass plates, and the Ritchie collection of early- to mid-20th-century roll film negatives.