Month: July 2020
The Road to Westerkirk
With the tentative lifting of Covid-19 restrictions, I was recently able to conduct my first bit of Books and Borrowing fieldwork since the project officially started in June. Thanks to the generosity of the library Trustees (and with suitable precautions taken) I’ve begun to dig into the rich collections of Westerkirk Parish Library, which lies […]
William Young and his Petition to the Sheriff of Perthshire
During the course of writing an essay on Romantic period readers at the Library of Innerpeffray for a collection entitled Before the Public Library: Reading Community and Identity in the Atlantic World, 1650-1850, edited by Mark Towsey and Kyle Roberts, I came across some fascinating archival evidence that provided a wonderful example of the importance […]
Unsung Heroes
In last week’s blog, Brian Aitken wrote about importing existing datasets into our Content Management System. Two of those datasets (for the Selkirk Subscription Library and the John Gray Library at Haddington) were generously donated to the project by Vivienne Dunstan, who transcribed the borrowings and undertook substantial genealogical research on the borrowers, during the […]
Importing existing datasets
The project is bringing together data on books, borrowers and borrowings that have been transcribed by previous projects, with the aim of making these datasets cross-searchable. Our project database consists of some 23 interrelated tables and we have a Content Management System through which the project team can add and edit records for libraries, ledgers, […]
Innerpeffray Library’s Borrowers’ Registers Pilot Project; or How the Whole Thing Started
When I took up my current post at the University of Stirling, after working at the Universities of Cambridge, St Andrews and London, I was lucky to return to the area not only where I was born (Strathearn), but where my family had lived for many generations. Successive ancestors had sat on the Board of […]