News: National Archives of Scotland to open a further 4,000 Government files

Other government files from the current release period are already in the public domain having been passed to NAS after FOISA was implemented in January 2005. Those files reflect subjects as diverse as determining fishing rights around Rockall, the Piper Alpha oil platform disaster, drug misuse and the onset of the AIDS epidemic, and events such as the 1986 Edinburgh Commonwealth Games and the 1988 Glasgow Garden Festival.

A final release of files to the year 1994 will take place later in 2010.

Using images of records from the 15th century to the 20th century, it shows how successive governments initially sought to keep information secret and from the public gaze, while later recognising the need to satisfy increasing public demand for freer access. Read more about the 'An Open Secret' exhibition.

One of the exhibits is a Scottish parliamentary record from 1488 which gave rise to a medieval conspiracy theory. Read about the mysterious death of James III. Another concerns a futuristic 1930s high-speed monorail system, whose prototype was tested in Milngavie near Glasgow, but was never built commercially Read more about the George Bennie Railplane.