Author: Katie Halsey
A Year of Books and Borrowing
It’s been a shamefully long time since I updated readers of this blog on things that have been happening on the Books and Borrowing front. This is mainly because it’s been an exceptionally busy year on many fronts, and, now that our funding from the AHRC is at an end, blogging has taken a back […]
Time to Celebrate! Report on Books and Borrowing Launch Event
Friday 26th April saw the long-awaited launch of the Books and Borrowing database! Almost all the project team were able to be there, and we very much enjoyed catching up with Alex and Gerry, who have been working elsewhere for the past couple of years, as well as getting the chance to show off our […]
World Book Day, 2024
Today, 7th March, 2024, is World Book Day! It seemed like a good moment, therefore, for a Books and Borrowing blog, which I’m going to use to update all of our loyal readers on some of the things that have been happening in the past couple of months. The first piece of news is that, […]
Books and Borrowing: A Retrospective
At this time of year, I normally write a blog based on Christmas borrowings from one of more of the libraries represented in the Books and Borrowing dataset. This year, however, I need to write something different. Astonishingly, we are now in the last few weeks of our funded period, and inching ever closer to […]
Hallowe’en Reading
Happy Spooky Season to all our loyal readers! Having just come back from the USA, where Hallowe’en is everywhere throughout October, I thought I would see what kinds of spooky reading events I could find in our dataset. A quick keyword search in our new digital resource (soon to be fully open to the public!) […]
Ted Powell Lecture at Innerpeffray
On 4th October I had the honour of giving the Ted Powell Memorial Lecture to the Friends of Innerpeffray Library. Ted Powell was a former librarian at Innerpeffray, and I was delighted to discover from his widow after the talk that he had been a great advocate of the Innerpeffray’s borrowers’ registers, and regularly urged […]
Stirling’s Historic Libraries
Here at the University of Stirling, we have been thinking about ways in which we might contribute to the celebrations for the 900th anniversary of Stirling burgh, and a colleague asked me to talk about Stirling’s historic libraries. Regular readers of this blog will know that none of the libraries featured in the Books and […]
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 […]
Five Go On A Writing Retreat
Last week several members of the Books and Borrowing team (Matt, Katie, Josh, Cleo and Maxine) attended the University of Stirling’s annual Eighteenth-Century Writing Group Writing Retreat in the lovely surroundings of Alexander House, Auchterarder. We all used the time to make significant progress on writing projects. Collectively, the participants managed a whopping 60,000 words […]
Libraries, Lives and Legacies Research Festival: Event Report – Part Two (Stirling)
Following on from last week’s blog, in which I reported on the first part of our Libraries Lives and Legacies Research Festival, held in Liverpool and online, this week’s blog will focus on the second of our events, the conference on Reading and Book Circulation 1650-1850, held at the Iris Murdoch Building of the University […]