Remembering

I am happy to assure your correspondent Adam Brown (Letters, 1 November) that we will be using Scotland-based academics and experts during our extensive First World War centenary coverage.

Our programming is spread over four years on television, on both BBC Scotland and BBC Alba, on Radio Scotland and Radio Nan Gaidheal and online.

It’s not feasible to list all the programmes here but bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/mediapacks/ww1/will give your readers a sense of the breadth of the programming which has already been announced.

We will be drawing on the knowledge of Scottish academics and historians in much of this output.

In addition to the programmes produced in Scotland, there will also be World War One At Home. This project will bring more than a thousand powerful stories to life – all linked to specific places across the UK.

As part of this project, personal stories from locations around the length and breadth of Scotland will air on BBC Radio Scotland.

The BBC is working with Imperial War Museums (IWM) on this project and the IWM’s First World War Centenary Partnership includes University of Dundee Museum Services, Aberdeen Maritime Museum, Education Scotland, John Gray Centre, Historic Glasgow, Dumfries and Galloway Aviation Museum and the Scottish Council on Archives.

Scottish academics will also be working with the Arts and Humanities Research Council to support World War One at Home and the project will also be supported by additional historians around Scotland.

We will be bringing together our nations, regions, international and local services in a combined effort to co-ordinate a wealth of programming across TV, radio and online. Collaborating in this way ensures that rather than being London-centric our programming will appeal to and reflect our diverse audiences across the whole of the UK.

We are confident that our partnership with Imperial War Museum, which is leading the First World War Centenary Partnership, will further add to the output we provide, as we are able to draw on its expertise and materials to enrich our programming.

We’ll be partnering with a variety of organisations and individuals across the UK including the Open University and the aforementioned UK-wide academics funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Donalda MacKinnon

Head of Programmes and Services

BBC Scotland

Pacific Quay, Glasgow

I look forward to reading in detail the First World War commemoration programme of the National Museum of Scotland (NMS) mentioned in Dr Gordon Rintoul’s letter (2 November). I will be particularly interested in seeing the contribution of the National War Museum (NWM).

I am aware of the NMS plans for “Homelands”, “Symbol of the poppy” and “Wha bears a blade for Scotland” but where is the plan for the NWM to go back to its roots, as it was when it was the Scottish Naval and Military Museum and an integral part of the Scottish National War Memorial? I hope Dr Rintoul can tell us the specific plans for 2014 not for the NMS generally, but for the NWM to tell Scots about their ancestors’ role in the First World War. At an event organised by Museums & Galleries Scotland last year someone from NMS admitted to me that the majority of the visitors to the NWM are not Scottish, but are foreign visitors to one of the UK’s most popular visitor attractions – Edinburgh Castle.

The NWM has an opportunity with the First World war centenary to re-engage with the people it was set up for nearly 90 years ago, but while other national war museums across the Western world are leading their country’s First World War commemorations, it appears to me that in Scotland the NMS has allowed the NWM to shirk that responsibility.

Adam Brown

Brunswick Terrace

Edinburgh