The Scran Trust - a registered charity - aims to provide educational access to digital materials representing our material culture and history. We are one of the largest educational online services in the UK supporting over 4,000 schools, libraries, colleges and universities.

We work in partnership with over 300 cultural institutions in Scotland and the rest of the UK. A number of institutions use our online solution - Scran-in-a-Box - to provide access to their own data. The learning resource service http://www.scran.ac.uk/ hosts 350,000 images, movies and sounds from museums, galleries, archives and the media. It can be used as a superior form of clip art or for particular learning applications.

Images of tigers, Charlie Chaplin, Sean Connery, a Degas, a Dali, images of war or whaling, standing stones, a pint of beer, an integrated circuit, or line drawings of an acorn or an adrenal gland demonstrate the range.

For learning, there are Pathfinder Packs for instant use; and tools such as Navigator, Albums, Stuff, Create, Multicreate, Mini Website and Slides to let you discover, store, design, assemble and share your own learning resources.

The Scran Trust was formed in 1996 and its founding partners were The National Museums Scotland, The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, The Scottish Museums Council and, by invitation, the Scottish Consultative Council on the Curriculum.

In its first five years, the Scran Trust engaged in a wide ranging scheme of grant awards which allowed cultural organisations to digitise parts of their collections to be made available for educational purposes. It developed an advanced licensing system which was commended by many in which the institution retained ownership of the digitised assets but made these available under licence to Scran. There followed further large grant aid partner projects with NOF Digitise funding through the National Library of Scotland.

Scran is funded through grant aid from the Scottish Executive, subscriptions and sales of services.

• Silver MUSE from the American Association of Museums (AAM), 'In recognition of the Highest Standards of Excellence in the use of Media and Technology…'.
• The ‘Jason Farradane’ award of the Institute of Information Scientists as "an outstanding piece of work in the Information Field".
• Listed as one of the top ten NGfL sites in the BECTa/Guardian Awards
• Listed as one of the Top Ten Online Museums in the world by The Guardian newspaper.
• Scottish Museum of the Year award for multimedia
• British Archaeological Society / Channel 4 award for multimedia

Scran has been a member of the Publishing Scotland (formally the Scottish Publishers Association) for a number of years, initially seeking assistance from the Association to help market CD-Rom titles.

In more recent times Scran has had a representative on the Association’s Educational advisory committee and been a point of liaison on the change to Publishing Scotland and the wider challenges of publishing in the ‘digital age’.