Stoddard-Templeton Collection
The Stoddard-Templeton Collection encompasses the design library, design archive and heritage carpet collection of James Templeton & Co Ltd and Stoddard International plc, two of Scotland’s most significant and influential carpet designers and manufacturers. It is managed by the University of Glasgow, the Glasgow School of Art and Glasgow Life.
Together, the University, School of Art and Glasgow Life are working to catalogue, conserve, digitise and provide access to the collection. This is a long term project that is being carried out as partners’ resources and funding awards permit.
The Collection is split as follows:
- Glasgow Life - Heritage carpet collection
- Glasgow School of Art - Design library collection and small carpet and textile collection
- University of Glasgow - Design and corporate archives and library collection
The Stoddard-Templeton Archive catalogue
The catalogue for the Archive is available online.
As it is an extensive collection, it has been split into separate sections – the corporate archive and the design archive.
The design archive listing contains a description of each of the 10,000 design papers used as an inspirational resource by the designers. This is divided into 142 sections, reflecting the arrangement by design style into plan chest drawers.
The corporate archive is split into twenty-two sections, reflecting the distinct companies whose records are included in the collection. In addition to the records of Stoddard’s and Templeton’s, the archive includes records of Blackwood, Morton & Sons Ltd, Henry Widnell & Stewart Ltd, Gray’s Carpets Ltd and Douglas, Reyburn & Co Ltd.
Other resources
- There is further guidance here to the Stoddard-Templeton collection.
- Images of designs: you can view a sample of the design archive on issuu. Images were also posted by the team cataloguing the collection during 2010-11, on the project blog, Flickr and as a Friday gems series on the our blog (to view all posts, search for Stoddard).
- We have created two finding aids for people looking for mentions of named members of staff:
- Index to articles in James Templeton & Co Ltd staff magazines
- Table of staff named in AF Stoddard and James Templeton photographs
Current Activities
Digitisation
We have a small scale digitisation programme that will see 250 of the design sketches and patterns digitised. This is complemented by students on the Information Management & Preservation (Digital) course using the design archive as part of their assessed work. Since 2010/11 students have each digitised 2 items from the archive.
All the digitised images will be made available on our Flickr site.
We will continue to seek additional funding to allow us to digitise the entire collection.
Archive Storage
We have now completed our programme to provide new plan chests for the design archive. All designs are now stored in archival standard plan chests within our environmentally controlled repository. The purchase of these plan chests has, in part, been supported by external funding.
Archive Services donation fund has supported the purchase of preservation packaging supplies for the photographs held as part of the Archive
Funders
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the National Fund for Acquisitions, the Friends of the National Libraries, and the Friends of Glasgow Museums in funding the acquisition of the Collection.
The National Heritage Memorial Fund grant also supported the conservation of two carpets, Order of the Elephant and City of London.
From Glasgow Green to Bendigo was supported by an award from the National Cataloguing Grants Programme for Archives. The award was made possible through the Wolfson Foundation’s contribution to the Programme.
The digitisation programme, and the purchase of two plan chests has been funded by awards from the Friends of Glasgow University Library.
We are grateful to all our funders for their support.