Month: June 2023
A Library Tour of Manchester
Reposted with permission from the Innerpeffray Library blog Back in December 2022, I headed to Manchester for a whirlwind day tour of some of its prestigious libraries! On the day I was lucky enough to take part in a tour of Chetham’s Library and spend a little time researching at the Portico Library. Unfortunately I […]
Forgotten Bestsellers: George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle (1749-88)
In our series on Forgotten Bestsellers, we have tended so far to focus on works of fiction, which I fear may perhaps have given loyal readers a slightly false impression of the genres most often borrowed from our libraries. In fact, although fiction does become very popular in the early nineteenth century, it is not […]
Some Notes on Book Hierarchies and Genre Classification
At the moment, Katie and I are working our way through one of the major normalisation tasks we need to complete before we can release the beta version of the database to our testers. This involves going through a (quite intimidating) spreadsheet detailing the 13,000 editions currently in our system and creating works-level records and […]
Adam Smith; Or, ‘Tis 300 Years Since
This year marks 300 years since the birth of Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith (1723–1790). More specifically, today – Monday 5 June 2023 – marks Smith’s 300th birthday.[1] Born in Kirkcaldy, in Fife, Scotland, Smith first attended the University of Glasgow as a student in 1737, aged just 14. He subsequently studied for a […]