Information preserved at Edinburgh City Archives

Edinburgh City Archives is responsible for the official records of the City of Edinburgh Council and its predecessor authorities.  It also collects historical records which relate to the history of Edinburgh and its surrounding areas created by:

• businesses
• societies
• clubs and other organisations
• individuals

Our aim is to permanently preserve and make these records available to the public.

Finding aids

There are currently top-level descriptions of our holdings online at the Scottish Archive Network resource.  ('Top-level' means that only a general description of each collection is given, not a detailed item-by-item list.)  To access details of our holdings once you have entered the online catalogue, type 'gb236' into the Archives reference box and the list of collections will appear.  Alternatively, you can carry out a free text search for a specific collection to find any relevant details. 

A list of the titles of our major collections is available to download from this page.  These give a reference code, descriptive title and covering dates for each one.  All our collections' reference codes are made up of either an 'SL' or an 'ED' prefix followed by a number - these codes are unique identifiers for each collection.

Collections Titles List 

• SL List - the vast majority of collections fall under this reference code
• ED List - only 12 collections are covered by this reference code