Here is a guide to some of the features of the Rucksack Club website that you may not be aware of:
Hut Availability Calendar
This calendar shows the availability of High Moss and Beudy Mawr (Craigallan doesn’t use it yet, but this may change). Note: the availability calendar is intended as a guide before contacting the Warden.
The Availability Calendar shows if the hut is empty, partially occupied, full, or reserved on any day. If you hover the cursor over a date, it also shows how many beds are reserved and by who. Currently the Availability Calendar is only visible to logged-in members, but discussions are underway on making it accessible without login. The Availability Calendar is accessed via the Huts menu
Meets Calendar
The new Meets Calendar is set up to display current information of all Rucksack Club events (Outdoor, Indoor, Wednesday meets etc). The coordinators of the different series of events have access to create and update events using a Google calendar at the back-end. Members can subscribe to this calendar from their own personal calendar. This means that all meets can be visible on a Member’s calendar (outlook, apple calendar etc) on their phones, laptop, tablets etc and details are updated live as information changes. The subscription process is a one-time thing and instructions will be sent out via Meetstaff. Once subscribed, members will no longer need to load the quarterley .ics calendar currently circulated via Meetstaff
Digital Archive
This is the structured library of material covering the 120+ years of the Clubs existence. This continues to be populated and will allow us to make more and more of the Club’s archive material available to both Members and the general public. As well as a useful tool, it reduces the work of the Club Archivist to respond to requests for information.
The current website archive now holds:
• 113 editions of The Rucksack Club Journal – every issue to date.
• 65 editions of Meetstaff – all that have so far been digitised.
• Hut log-books for Tal-y-Braich and for Beudy Mawr from 1926 to 2022.
• 3 collected volumes of “On the Hill with…” – some 32 detailed interviews, all that have ever been published.
• The complete archives and downloads of the Anabasis Club (a lot of material covering the 60 years of its existence)
• Rucksack Club AGM minutes and Committee minutes which are added to as material is available
• Various Members-Only documents
• A full digital copy of the book Mountain Rescue in Scotland by Bob Sharp
The archive can be accessed from the Get Out There menu or via this link: Digital Archive
Indoor Meets Video Gallery
A separate archive of all the videos of lectures from the Club’s Indoor and Virtual Meets programme are available via the website and are added to as new material is produced. The gallery now numbers some 53 excellent presentations from invited speakers and Club members.
The video gallery can be accessed from the Get Out There menu or via this link: Virtual Meets
Search facility across all webpages, photographs and documents
An exciting development is the addition of a very powerful search capability to the website. This has entailed the indexing of over 4000 webpages, photographs and documents. The really clever part is the ability for the search to include the contents of all the pdf documents in the digital archive (journals, meetstaff etc) – this has resulted in the auto-building of an index of well over a million word occurrences. The search capability also respects the website security model and only returns details of material that the user has the right to see.