Author: Katie Halsey
Return from Orkney
Like Harriot Byron, I ask, what am I to do with my gratitude? I can do nothing but thank you and go on.[1] In this quotation, Jane Austen quotes Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison to thank her sister Cassandra for her kindness in sending a long letter. I, too, wish to record my gratitude for the […]
The Archives Re-Open: Planning for Research in the Orkney Archives
News that archives and libraries are now able to re-open has been enormously welcome to the whole project team as we start to plan our research over the summer and for the remainder of this year. I am particularly excited to be planning a long-delayed and long-anticipated trip up to the Orkney Archives in Kirkwall […]
Women Borrowers
Today is International Women’s Day, and so I have been reflecting on the women in our records. I thought I would begin with a famous passage from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, in which the speaker is barred from entering a library in one of the ‘Oxbridge’ colleges: [H]ere I was actually at […]
World Book Day with Books and Borrowing
Today, Thursday 4 March 2021, we celebrate World Book Day with a look at some of the favourite books in our partner libraries’ records. In some of our previous blogs, Alex Deans wrote about the popularity of Jane Porter’s The Scottish Chiefs (1810) at Westerkirk Miners’ Library in the period 1813 to 1816, Gerard McKeever […]
Reporting on Progress
Just before Christmas, I wrote the second of the project’s progress reports, designed to bring the members of our Advisory Board up to date with how we have been doing. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank every member of our board – Prof. Jennie Batchelor; Dr Robert Betteridge; Dr John Crawford; D. Alexander […]
The Team Attends the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies Conference, 6th-8th January 2021
Last week saw the project team join forces with our friends at the Libraries, Reading Communities and Cultural Formation in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic project to present a panel at the 50th annual conference of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (BSECS). Our panel involved each member of both teams giving a very brief introduction to […]
Christmas Borrowing!
As this will be our last blog before Christmas, due to the closure of both Universities over the holiday season, I thought it might be interesting to think a little about winter borrowings. An interesting finding that seems to hold true across the analysis we have thus far been able to do, is that throughout […]
Types of Libraries
A prevailing theme seems to be appearing on this blog, which is about our interest in categorisation and classification! Along with thinking through how to categorise both books and borrowers, we’ve also needed to do some reflecting on how to classify the types of libraries involved in our study. Our initial breakdown of the libraries […]
Craigston Castle Borrowers’ Register
Very exciting news this week – we are adding another library to our project! We are very grateful to be able to include the loans register of Craigston Castle, in Turriff, Aberdeenshire by kind permission of William Urquhart, the current laird. Warm thanks are due also to Sandra Cumming, who is joining the project as […]
Water Drinkers at Leighton Library
Returning to the archives felt like a very exciting moment! I spent two days photographing the manuscript registers of the Leighton Library, now held at the University of Stirling Archives. Details of the Leighton Collection, including transcriptions of three MS catalogues, are available online. The Leighton Library (or Biblioteca Leightoniana) was founded on the collection […]