The mission of Scottish Church Heritage Research (SCHR) is to make visible and accessible online the past and present places of worship in Scotland for historical and heritage purposes. To achieve its mission SCHR focuses on updating and completing the Places of Worship in Scotland (POWiS) project started in 2000.

Scottish Church Heritage Research (SCHR) s both a company limited by guarantee with a Memorandum and Articles of Association under the Companies Acts and also a charity registered with the Office of Scottish Charity Regulation (OSCR).
There is one level of subscriber membership which is open to all through the payment of the annual subscription fee. The trustees are nominated and elected by subscriber members to manage the governance of SCHR and operation of POWiS in accordance with company, charity, and other regulatory requirements.

SCHR’s main resources are its database, website, mapping search tool, and its community of subscriber members, volunteers and contributors. It relies on voluntary efforts and the modest outlays needed to create, operate and update its database and online presence. SCHR is committed to the principles of public domain accessibility and Creative Commons IPR.
From this point onwards SCHR will operate as a virtual online-only community of subscriber members, volunteers, and contributors. Although POWiS is a freestanding project, SCHR seeks to link its data and archives to those of other historical and heritage bodies and societies and to reduce, where possible, duplication of effort.

The principal and long term objectives of SCHR are to:

i. Complete and update its inventory - Places of Worship in Scotland (POWiS) - of (currently) 11,000 sites used now or in the past as places of worship.

ii. Create and maintain a digital database accessed through a website that is easy to use, and open both to public use and to contributions of text and images.

iii. Compile accurate information including location, descriptions, current usage, and timeline as well as images, literature and source references for all sites on or added to the database.

iv. More rapidly fill out and update the database with the help of subscriber members, regular volunteers, and occasional contributors.

v. Provide editorial and quality control to maintain accurate and up to date site entries.

vi. Foster a community of people interested in recording, editing, and sharing data related to places of worship in Scotland.

vii. Establish links to other church heritage databases and data sharing platforms and communities under open source and Creative Commons protocols.

viii. Maintain a secure digital archive for the database and SCHR business compliant with data protection.

SCHR
Updated October 2023