Category: Project News
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, […]
World Book Day, 2025
Today, 7th March, 2025, is World Book Day! It seemed like a good moment, therefore, for a Books and Borrowing blog, which I’m going to use to update all of our loyal readers on some of the things that have been happening in the past couple of months. The first piece of news is that, […]
Books and Borrowing: A Retrospective
At this time of year, I normally write a blog based on Christmas borrowings from one of more of the libraries represented in the Books and Borrowing dataset. This year, however, I need to write something different. Astonishingly, we are now in the last few weeks of our funded period, and inching ever closer to […]
Scottish Student Marginalia in the Romantic Period: A PhD
Hello! My name is Rachael Tarrant and I am the latest, and fourth, PhD researcher to join ranks with the Books and Borrowing team (shortly to be followed by Jacqueline next year) – a climbing number that itself testifies to the germinating power of the Books and Borrowing project. My SGSAH AHRC funded PHD, co-supervised […]
Wild Words and Spooky Happenstance: A Festival Diary
Republished with permission from The Library of Innerpeffray Blog From Thursday 7 to Sunday 10 September 2023, Innerpeffray Library hosted its third annual Festival of Reading, celebrating the theme of Wild Words. Authors, poets, storytellers, musicians, artists, and readers met in and around the historic location of Scotland’s first free lending library. On Thursday evening, […]
Ted Powell Lecture at Innerpeffray
On 4th October I had the honour of giving the Ted Powell Memorial Lecture to the Friends of Innerpeffray Library. Ted Powell was a former librarian at Innerpeffray, and I was delighted to discover from his widow after the talk that he had been a great advocate of the Innerpeffray’s borrowers’ registers, and regularly urged […]
Libraries and Class Identity in Scotland, 1800-1842: A PhD
I’m back – and this time for the long haul! Books and Borrowing is a project that I’ve greatly enjoyed being involved with since receiving a Carnegie Vacation Scholarship in summer 2020, which enabled me to conduct three months of research with the project team (you can read about this research here, here, and here). […]
Digital Picket
We are observing the strike actions called by the University and College Union (UCU) and respecting the digital picket. Our blogs will return October. The UCU website has more information about the strike actions.
A Visitor to Innerpeffray Library: Rupert Vardon de Burgh Griffith
Reposted with permission from the Innerpeffray Library blog: https://innerpeffraylibrary.co.uk/visitor-vignettes-lieutenant-rupert-vardon-de-burgh-griffith/ Almost exactly 124 years ago, on 22nd August 1899, one of my favourite signatures was entered into the Innerpeffray Visitors’ Books by a young visitor to the library. Every time I come across this page, I am delighted all over again that Alice Mary Griffith allowed […]
An Englishman in New York: A visit to Manhattan and the New York Society Library
Continuing my tour of American subscription libraries, I left Charleston and flew almost 650 miles north to New York and LaGuardia Airport. New York City is a true cornucopia of libraries, ranging from the magnificence that is the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building of New York Public Library, to the equally impressive Morgan Library & Museum, […]