Hamish Scott Henderson was a published poet and member of the Scottish literary renaissance of the later twentieth century, a folksong collector and promoter of the folksong revival, a cultural historian, a Scottish nationalist, an international democratic socialist, a European intellectual and a campaigner for numerous causes.
His archive includes over 10,000 items of correspondence, particularly relating to poetry and folksong. There are also 136 notebooks and diaries and other miscellaneous papers. The archive is an ideal fit with the collections at Edinburgh University Library, which already include rich archives and book collections of modern Scottish poets such as George Mackay Brown, Norman MacCaig and Hugh MacDiarmid. The Library also has major collections relating to Scottish folklore and song, such as the Carmichael Watson archive and the papers of Marjory Kennedy-Fraser.