Category: Project News
Robert Chambers’ Circulating Library Borrowing Register, 1828-1829
The Chambers Library Borrowing Register: A Unique Manuscript A surviving borrowing register for Robert Chambers’ circulating library, which operated in Edinburgh in the 1820s, records book loans from 1828-1829 (NLS, Dep. 341/413). The Books and Borrowing project is working with the National Library of Scotland to conserve and digitise this unique manuscript that K. A. […]
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 […]
Event Report: Library Lives at Innerpeffray
On Saturday 22nd May we held the first of several project events intended to bring our work with Scotland’s historical borrowing records to a wider public. Entitled Library Lives: Books, Borrowing and Beyond, the event was co-hosted by our project partners at Innerpeffray Library, and offered two hours of short talks and live research on […]
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 […]
Reporting on Progress
Just before Christmas, I wrote the second of the project’s progress reports, designed to bring the members of our Advisory Board up to date with how we have been doing. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank every member of our board – Prof. Jennie Batchelor; Dr Robert Betteridge; Dr John Crawford; D. Alexander […]
The Team Attends the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies Conference, 6th-8th January 2021
Last week saw the project team join forces with our friends at the Libraries, Reading Communities and Cultural Formation in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic project to present a panel at the 50th annual conference of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (BSECS). Our panel involved each member of both teams giving a very brief introduction to […]
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 […]
Rebellion, Enlightenment and Rollin
The commonplace narratives of Scottish history tell us that, in the late 1740s and early 1750s, the nation was reckoning with the aftermath of an unsuccessful Jacobite rebellion and laying the groundwork for an economic boom that, by the 1780s, would have transformed Scotland into a modern imperial power. This era was accompanied by a […]
Types of Libraries
A prevailing theme seems to be appearing on this blog, which is about our interest in categorisation and classification! Along with thinking through how to categorise both books and borrowers, we’ve also needed to do some reflecting on how to classify the types of libraries involved in our study. Our initial breakdown of the libraries […]
Political Readers and the Associational Reading Space: Starting a PhD on Library Records
by Josh Smith Recovering evidence of historical reading can often be a fraught endeavour for the historical researcher as the purpose and act of reading remains intrinsically personal to the individual reader. Yet library borrowing records are one of the clearest sources available to those assessing which printed publications historical audiences engaged with. Of course, […]