Category: Borrowers
The World in Print: Borrowings of Voyages and Travels
Voyages and travels were among the most borrowed books from Scottish libraries in the eighteenth century and Romantic era. Travel narratives and works of geographical description could encompass an almost limitless range of subjects, reflecting a period that was characterised by colonisation and war, as well as a burgeoning interest in natural history, antiquity, and […]
William Hunter’s Library and Legacy: The Hunterian Museum Library
Dr William Hunter (1718-1783) left his collections to his nephew Matthew Baillie who had the use of them with the understanding that they would eventually be given to the University of Glasgow. By the early nineteenth century, Baillie had established his own medical practice and he and his fellow trustees set in motion plans to […]
John Millar’s Borrowings in Spring 1768: A Preview of the Glasgow Professors Borrowing Registers
I was part of project to transcribe and analyse the University’s student and professorial borrowing registers in 2018 and 2019. The Glasgow project was one of the three pilot projects for ‘Books and Borrowing’, along with transcribing and analysing registers from the Innerpeffray Library and the University of St Andrews. Eighteenth-Century Borrowing from the University […]
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 […]
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 […]
Religious Occupations
Over the past few weeks, one of the things we have been discussing as a team is how to structure data about our borrowers in order to make the eventual search and browse functions as flexible and useful as possible. Our friends at the Libraries, Reading Communities & Cultural Formation in the C18th Atlantic project […]
William Young and his Petition to the Sheriff of Perthshire
During the course of writing an essay on Romantic period readers at the Library of Innerpeffray for a collection entitled Before the Public Library: Reading Community and Identity in the Atlantic World, 1650-1850, edited by Mark Towsey and Kyle Roberts, I came across some fascinating archival evidence that provided a wonderful example of the importance […]
Innerpeffray Library’s Borrowers’ Registers Pilot Project; or How the Whole Thing Started
When I took up my current post at the University of Stirling, after working at the Universities of Cambridge, St Andrews and London, I was lucky to return to the area not only where I was born (Strathearn), but where my family had lived for many generations. Successive ancestors had sat on the Board of […]