Category: Borrowers
The Most Borrowed Books of the Leighton Library’s Water Drinkers
by Jacqueline Kennard I’m thrilled about my temporary placement with Books and Borrowing and to be writing my first blog post! Funded by the Carnegie Trust’s Undergraduate Vacation Scholarship, I’ll be spending twelve weeks comparing and analysing early-nineteenth-century book borrowings from five libraries in provincial Scotland, namely the Leighton Library, St Andrews University Library, the […]
Celebrity Spotting – Robert Riddell at St Andrews
Work has been continuing on the massive body of borrowing data we have from St Andrews University library. With the roughly 4,000 records of the 1748-1753 mixed professors/students register entered into our system, my attention has recently been on the 1772-1776 student ledger. This volume presents some distinctive challenges. In general, librarians’ record-keeping develops a […]
Walter Scott at Innerpeffray: Read to Death
Innerpeffray Library has now re-opened to visitors! After a longer than usual winter closure period due to lockdown and Covid-19 restrictions, you can once again travel to rural Perthshire and see the first free public library in Scotland – and its new exhibition. Celebrating the 250th anniversary of the birth of Sir Walter Scott, ‘Read […]
A First Look at the University of Edinburgh Library Borrowers’ Receipt Books
We were delighted to report on a milestone on Twitter for our project last month: We have now taken delivery of 9,992 pages from 35 borrowers’ receipt books from @pettigrew_s and the fabulous digitisation team at @CRC_EdUni. All during a global pandemic! We cannot thank them enough! These record the book borrowings of students and […]
7 Pieces of Music to be Arranged: Women Borrowers and the First Female Cataloguer of the St Andrews Copyright Music Collection
Guest post by Dr Karen E McAulay, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland In 1801, the University of St Andrews started binding a backlog of legally deposited sheet music. Music was roughly sorted into volumes for voice, piano or instrumental ensemble; binding became a routine practice over the subsequent three and a half decades. The music was […]
Women Borrowers at Westerkirk Library
To mark Women’s History Month, we’re running a series of blogs to highlight the women who wrote and borrowed the books found in our libraries. Today, I’m returning to Westerkirk Library in Dumfriesshire, where a small but active cohort of women members made over 250 borrowings between 1813 and 1818. Eight of the 120 borrowers […]
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 […]
Books, Borrowing, and the Bannatyne Club
By Kelsey Jackson Williams Not many people today would recognise the Bannatyne Club if you mentioned it in casual conversation, but in 1820s Edinburgh it was a name on everyone’s lips. Branded ‘harder to gain entry to than parliament’, the exclusive society, at first limited to thirty-five members, later to a hundred, had been founded […]
Scottish Libraries and the Associational World
‘Ours is the age of societies. For the redress of every oppression that is done under the sun, there is a public meeting. For the cure of every sorrow by which our land or our race can be visited, there are patrons, vice-presidents, and secretaries. For the diffusion of every blessing of which mankind can […]
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 […]