Author: Matt Sangster
Books and Borrowing Database Launch Event – Friday 26th April, 4pm – University of Glasgow
Dearest Blog Readers, We are delighted to invite you to celebrate the launch of the ‘Books and Borrowing, 1750-1830’ database, which (as you doubtless know if you’re reading this post) archives and interprets borrowing records covering eighteen different Scottish libraries active in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Using formerly unexplored (or underexplored) registers, […]
Penned in the Margins
One of the things that the Books and Borrowing database allows us to do is find out which library holdings were heavily used in the period the project covers, determine whether books still remain in collections and then see if any evidence of use survives between their covers. We’ve not yet had the chance to […]
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 […]
Final Year…
It doesn’t feel like Books and Borrowing has been running for two-and-a-half years, but this is nevertheless the case, and as we enter 2023, we’re now beginning the final year of the project in its current form. We will have somewhat more time than we thought back in June 2020, as the AHRC has kindly […]
Libraries, Lives and Legacies: Further Details on our Call for Papers for April 2023
This week, we’d like to highlight the Call for Papers we posted a couple of weeks back (posted again in full below) and provide a bit of extra detail about our Research Festival. In April 2023, Books and Borrowing and our friends on the C18th Libraries Online project expect to be able to launch initial […]
The Final Year: What Goes In?
The end of Year 2 is an odd time for a project like this. We can, I think, rightly be proud of where we’ve got to despite pandemic circumstances, with over 125,000 records currently in the system. This meets our benchmark and puts us on course to reach our target of 150,000 records by the […]
Looking Forward to 2022
The Books and Borrowing team have now returned to work after the holidays – in the first half of 2022, we’re entering a crucial stage of the project as we build out the materials we have in the system, cover the libraries we have yet to engage with in detail, conduct contextualisation and normalisation, and […]
Numbers, Focus and Prioritisation
Over the last few weeks, the Books and Borrowing team have been working on a problem of which we were aware at the outset of the project, but one that has grown in prominence as we’ve discovered more library records and added further institutions to our list while conducting our research. Our target is to […]
Life Cycles and Henry Brooke’s The Fool of Quality
In each of our weekly meetings for Books and Borrowing, we talk a bit about what we’ve been noticing in the registers – strange anomalies, popular books, quirks of record-keeping practices and so on. Sometimes the popular books becoming apparent from the data we’re transcribing are relatively predictable: for example, the works of Charles Rollin […]
Eighteenth-Century Borrowing from the University of Glasgow
One of the pilot projects for ‘Books and Borrowing’ was ‘Enlightenment Readers in the Scottish Universities’, which was funded by a Research Incentive grant from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland and a grant from the University of Glasgow’s Chancellor’s Fund. This project was conducted by three of the Books and Borrowing team […]