Category: Partners
Books and Borrowing: Edinburgh’s 19th Century Readers – Online Event with NLS
In conjunction with our partners at the National Library of Scotland, we’re pleased to announce the upcoming online event, ‘Books and Borrowing: Edinburgh’s 19th Century Readers’, which will take place from 5.00-6.00pm on Thursday 23 June, 2022. This event is free, and we invite you to book your place through Eventbrite. Join the Books and […]
Event Report: Books and Borrowing in Eighteenth-Century Glasgow
We had the pleasure of running an event in Glasgow University Library Special Collections last week. This was an opportunity for us to share some of the research we have done specifically on the university’s own records, while bringing together colleagues with cognate interests to think more expansively about the Glasgow context and about the […]
Event Preview: Books and Borrowing in Eighteenth-Century Glasgow
On Thursday 7th April, we are running the next of our project events: ‘Books and Borrowing in Eighteenth-Century Glasgow’ will be a convivial in-person/online workshop exploring eighteenth-century literary culture using the borrowing records of Glasgow University Library. It is being co-produced with our partners at GUL Special Collections. The event will be an opportunity to […]
Anatomy of a Holding: Robert Burns at the Wigtown Subscription Library
The accounts of the Wigtown Subscription Library in Galloway register a payment of one pound, eleven shillings and sixpence for ‘Burns’s works’ on 22 October 1800, followed by a payment of sixpence for ‘Carriage from Dumfries’ five days later.[1] Cross-reference to the library’s borrowing registers reveal that this text was in four volumes, confirming it […]
The Midway Point
We are now at the midway point of the Books and Borrowing project! We are eighteen months in, with eighteen left to go. It seemed, therefore, a good time to stop and reflect on what we have achieved so far, and what remains to be done. I want to begin this reflection with some personal […]
A First Look at the Advocates Library
We have now taken delivery of a first set of images from the borrowers’ receipt books of the Advocates Library with the permission of our partners the Faculty of Advocates and via the digitisation skills of our partners the National Library of Scotland. Our Digital Humanities Research Officer Brian Aitken has loaded these to our […]
A First Look at the Aberdeen Theological Library
In 1826, the first of a series of royal commissions was established that would report on the condition and management of the Scottish universities at intervals in the nineteenth century. The range of materials gathered by the commissioners today provide historians with an extraordinary insight into the evolution of Scottish education, including the operation of […]
The Royal High School of Edinburgh and the University of Edinburgh
I’ve been so delighted to get started with the Books and Borrowing team and have really enjoyed getting stuck in and learning all about the project’s Content Management System (CMS) and what’s been achieved so far. ‘Books and Borrowing’ is a project close to my heart as my PhD focused on the pupil borrowing records […]
Festival of Reading
Last week I spent a delightful few days at the Library of Innerpeffray’s inaugural Festival of Reading! From 8 to 11 September 2021, Innerpeffray hosted eight Tayside writers to celebrate the Past on the Page, in celebration of the 250th anniversary of the birth of Sir Walter Scott. In the run up to the festival, […]
Agricultural Improvement at Westerkirk Library
One of the fascinating things about working on the records of Westerkirk Parish Library has been watching the way its borrowing records reflect a gradual transition from a miners’ library in the 1790s, to a rural subscription library by the 1810s. This long-term shift is suggested by descriptions of Westerkirk parish and its library in […]