Glasgow Sunflowers Baseball Club
Our Heritage, Our Future worked with the Glasgow Sunflowers Baseball Club, a baseball team for women, non-binary and all trans people based in Glasgow's southside, to examine approaches to heritage ownership and presentation and to consider how members might contribute to established heritage spaces.
We began with discussions exploring how ideas like identity, diversity and equality are represented by and intersect with heritage. We then visited LGBTQ+ and Glasgow-focused archives at the National Library of Scotland, Glasgow Women’s Library, Glasgow Museums Resource Centre and Historic Environment Scotland and met with curators and archivists to consider these themes.
It was decided that a collaborative scrapbook would be made to capture the experiences and hopes of the Glasgow Sunflowers in 2024. Contributions were gathered from the wider club and the dedicated heritage group put together the inaugural Sunflowers Scrapbook.
Members of the Glasgow Sunflowers heritage group, alongside members of the Our Heritage, Our Future team, took part in digitisation training, learning how to copy archive material from a museum professional. The team members used these skills to create a digital copy of the scrapbook.
The scrapbook was accessioned into the Mitchell Library Glasgow City Archives in December 2025.
Our work with the Sunflowers Baseball Club has contributed to the development of the Exploring Identity, Diversity and Representation unit as part of our Cultural Heritage Skills Training programme. While Sunflowers participants were not able to receive the unit at the time of working with us, they were awarded Heritage Hero awards from Archaeology Scotland for their work in creating and preserving the club's heritage through their scrapbook.
The Our Heritage, Our Future project has made a huge impact on our team and provided real practical skills for various members, not only through workshops but through training for skills like digitisation.
Heather Hilditch, Sunflowers Baseball Team
I hadn’t realised how much of recent history has been recorded and how easily accessible it is. The idea that the story of the Sunflowers (and those who comprise it) could be stored in a large institution legitimises our history in a way that floored me.
Anonymous Participant, Sunflowers Baseball Team
News
Over the past year, members of the Glasgow Sunflowers Baseball Club have been working with us through the Our Heritage, Our Future programme to create a scrapbook capturing the ethos of the club and its participants and showcasing how identify, sport and heritage intersect.
The scrapbook will be entered into national archives to ensure community voices are part of our national heritage collections.
This #NationalInnovationWeek, we reflect on the support we have given communities to embrace digital technologies to preserve and record the past, to explore the opportunities for creating new heritage legacies and to share tools through training to learn from our past.
We support the 