SCRAN, the Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network, is a Millennium project, spending 15 million pounds of UK National Lottery money to build a networked multimedia digital library for the teaching and celebration of human history and material culture in Scotland.

Although based on the museums, archives, libraries and built heritage of Scotland, SCRAN's prime concern is not with conservation, nor with documentation, but with educational access.

SCRAN is an electronic rights management project, grant-aiding the digitisation of assets in exchange for a non-exclusive licence for their educational use.

It is also a resource disclosure and delivery project: SCRAN acts as a Metadata repository, pointing to digitised assets in its own resource base and to objects in the real world, as well as acting as a gateway to other electronic collections.

SCRAN is thus an early implementer of emerging standards, both the Z39-50 Search and Retrieve Protocol and the Dublin Core Metadata Element set for cross domain access.

The SCRAN project was launched November 1996, and already SCRAN has built a resource base giving WWW access to hundreds of thousands of cultural records from Shetland to Galloway and from Fair Isle to Dunbar. Thousands of these records include multimedia: images, sound and film clips and virtual reality, ready formatted and copyright cleared for classroom use.

SCRAN's first educational products are already in service, and one of them, the "Scottish People" CD-ROM, has been distributed to every school in Scotland.

SCRAN is innovative, practical and timely, an excellent example of a "power station" for the United Kingdom's National Grid for Learning.