Author: Kit Baston
Collections Management as Borrowing-record Stand-in in the Australian Subscription Library
By Brittani Ivan, PhD Candidate at Western Sydney University My work is something of a departure from this website’s usual fare, as my primary area of study is an Australian, rather than a Scottish Library: The Australian Subscription Library of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Founded in 1826, the Australian Subscription Library was first self-proclaimed […]
Mrs Felix Yaniewicz and the Chambers’ Circulating Library, 1829
Sometimes the stars seem to align when doing research. For Books and Borrowing, the configuration of the arrival and transcription of the Chambers’ Borrowing Register and the identification of one of its borrowers has been almost spooky for me in the case of Mrs Yaniewicz. Mrs Yaniewicz took a ‘New Books’ quarterly subscription from the […]
Robert Simson’s Books at the University of Glasgow
One of the many delights of working on the Books and Borrowing project is the discovery and inclusion of more borrowing registers as we progress. From our original fourteen, we have gone to eighteen. Our latest arrival, the Simson Borrowing Register, is linked to the Glasgow University Library and we thank the Archives and Special […]
The Pirate, The Sea and a Cargo of Books
by Linda Cracknell The moral compass was already set when I launched North in May to run a creative writing workshop at the Orkney Library & Archive, Kirkwall, Orkney. The Books and Borrowing project had established that there was an enthusiastic readership in nineteenth-century Orkney for both local Mary Brunton’s best-selling novel of moral excellence, […]
Guest Post – An Overview of Glasgow in the Eighteenth Century
by Dr Craig Lamont, University of Glasgow In April, the Books and Borrowing project examined a swathe of material relating to eighteenth-century Glasgow, with papers on registers, marginalia, the missing lectures of Adam Smith, and the cultural context of William Hunter’s library. To set the scene, I provided an overview of Glasgow in the period, […]
Guest Post – Event Horizons: Books and Borrowing in Eighteenth Century Glasgow
by Christina Devlin, Professor of English and Reading, Montgomery College, Maryland In April, I was a guest at Books and Borrowing’s workshop at Archives and Special Collections at the University of Glasgow. The twelfth-floor view of the Campsie Hills, new to me as a recent transplant to Glasgow, epitomized how the project expands studies of […]
Guest Post – Institutional Borrowing: Inventories, Registers, Receipt Books
By Dr Dahlia Porter, University of Glasgow [This post is based on a talk I gave at the Books and Borrowing event on 7 April 2022, which was unfortunately interrupted by a power outage!] In this post, I am going to compare book borrowing registers like those being digitized by the Books and Borrowing project […]
Il étoit une fois…: The Advocates Library and the ‘Le Cabinet des Fées’
When I began transcribing the borrowing registers of the Advocates Library, I expected to find that law reports, Session Papers, periodicals, and books of law were popular with the erudite lawyers of the Faculty of Advocates. I took stock upon the completion of the transcriptions for two registers covering the period from 1 April 1788 […]
A First Look at the Advocates Library
We have now taken delivery of a first set of images from the borrowers’ receipt books of the Advocates Library with the permission of our partners the Faculty of Advocates and via the digitisation skills of our partners the National Library of Scotland. Our Digital Humanities Research Officer Brian Aitken has loaded these to our […]
William Robertson (1721-1793): Minister, Principal, Historian
This year marks the tercentenary of the birth of a major figure of the Scottish Enlightenment. William Robertson was a leading moderate minister of the Church of Scotland, Principal of the University of Edinburgh from 1762 until 1793, and a famous author of historical works. Robertson’s three major historical works, The History of Scotland (2 […]