With premises open every month of the year, the archive’s reading room hosted visitors from the local, national, and international queer community on a year-round basis. With the addition of funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund and the National Lottery Awards for All programme, the archive’s team grew from 2023 to include a salaried community project coordinator and an oral history project coordinator. In 2025 we delivered 19 events and a programme of regular reading groups welcomes different members of the community within the archive’s reading room to discuss different themes in queer literature. These groups leverage the archive’s reading room and structure initially and now run semi-independently. In addition to the regular funding received from the National Lottery, the archive also participated in partnership work with Edinburgh Art Festival during Edinburgh’s festival season. These partnerships expand our reach to new audiences within and out with the community. The archive also benefitted from funds allocated by Edinburgh 900 which allowed the archive’s staff and volunteers to develop an exhibition of queer history related to the city of Edinburgh. Volunteers continue to be fundamental to the archive’s success. During the year, volunteers contributed almost 1000 hours across areas as diverse as caring for our collection, planning events, recording and preparing events for digital archiving, hosting visitors and training. Volunteer training and capacity building became a focus for the organisation, and the community project paid for training in digital media, collections care, and in research and interpretation. Volunteers joined staff to present their work at the Scottish Council on Archives and the Queer Heritage Collections Network, completed publications, and programmed successful events. Additional directors were recruited with additional experience, which brings the total number of directors to twelve. The founding directors continue to make in person and online appearances to promote the archive and its work with other arts, heritage, and community organisations. The founding directors recorded a video with the National Galleries of Scotland in April, appeared with The National Library of Scotland in May, Edinburgh Art Festival in August, at the Radical Book Fair in November, and with the LGBTI+ Rainbow Network of the NatWest Group. Some of these appearances generated appearance fees for the organisation as well as providing a platform for promotion and collaboration. The organisation launched the online public catalogue in November 2023. This resource now has over 3,300 books listed and continues to be available to researchers, academics, students, and members of the wider queer community 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It is the culmination of tireless hours of user experience consultation, manual data entry, and data validation. The catalogue now sits alongside the organisation’s social media platforms and website to promote the archive and its services to a global community.

Ongoing partnerships and relationships with LGBT Health and Wellbeing, LGBT Youth Scotland, the Scottish Council on Archives, the Glasgow Women’s Library, City of Edinburgh Museums and Galleries and the National Library of Scotland continue to provide significant meaningful input to our operations and outreach in relation to our growing collection and our expanding community impact. A funded oral history project is underway, benefiting from the lessons learned and best practices developed by some of these organisations. The diverse and engaged volunteer cohort represents several other significant groups of stakeholders, and their experience and interests continue to drive forward the organisation’s work. During this year, several events and reading groups came into being thanks to the planning and leadership of the volunteers. These events help us reach new groups and promote the voices of intersectional groups of stakeholders within the wide reach of the archive’s community.

No remuneration was received

No transfer of assets other than for full consideration