Keith and Elizabeth Lumsden
Keith and his wife Elizabeth's involvement with tartan dates back to the early 90's when they were commissioned to organise the archives of the Scottish Tartans Society (STS). Elizabeth is a qualified Archivist and Book Restorer and the society had a large but anarchic collection of books, notes, and samples of tartans dating back to the nineteenth century and Keith was tasked with cataloguing the collection.
Working for the STS they were instrumental in the founding in 1993 of The Register of All Publicly Known Tartans - this being the first ever formalised ‘Register' of tartans. The Register (RAPKT) was ran by the STS but set up as a separate charity dedicated to the purpose of registering and recording tartans. The register was based on the extensive STS collection of tartan samples together with documentation and notes. Keith became its official Registrar creating the systems needed to assimilate the society's index of tartans (Sindex). Tartan registration was computerised for the first time and made available to the general public. In 1997 it was placed on the Internet. Registrations including Recordings were running at nearly 100 per annum of new tartans from across the world. Keith had also developed a reputation by this time as both an authority on tartan and as a talented tartan designer. Also around this time Keith and Elizabeth established a small commercial company to undertake design work.
From 1999 Keith was principal consultant to the team developing Tartan Generator and Tartan Designer and remains in this role to this day.
In 2000 the STS decided to stop running the RAPKT, recording tartans, and offering the services of registration. At that point Keith and Elisabeth decided to retire from the Society. There was a danger that the archive would be split up and the information become remote from the public. They formed The Scottish Tartans World Register (STWR) a charity to replace the RAPKT with the database that was used by the STS. The STWR database was fully computerised and released on the internet. Further it was to actively campaign for a statutory Register of Tartans. This seemed to be an ideal task for the new Scottish Parliament. It has been successful in that it is now expected a Scottish National Register will be enacted by the end of 2008.
See the following articles published on the Scottish Parliament website:
Tartan Designer
Tartan Saver
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