Category: Project News
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, […]
Subject Classifications
An important consideration for our Books and Borrowing database is how useful it will be for researchers. Not just us, but anyone who would like to use our data in the future. One question our team has been working on is how to classify the thousands of entries our database will contain. Our original vision […]
Broughton House Visit
Broughton House in the coastal town of Kirkcudbright is the former home of the colourist painter Edward Atkinson Hornel (1864-1933), who was part of the ‘Glasgow Boys’ circle. This beautiful Georgian townhouse, which once belonged to Alexander Murray (c.1680-1750), Provost of Kirkcudbright and formerly a local MP, is now a museum managed by the National […]
A year at Westerkirk
Back in July, I wrote about my trip to the evocative Westerkirk Parish Library in Dumfriesshire to photograph materials for the Books and Borrowing project. The process of adding records from the library’s manuscript borrowing register (styled the ‘Kalendar’ by its users) into the database is now well underway, and I recently passed a minor […]
Craigston Castle Borrowers’ Register
Very exciting news this week – we are adding another library to our project! We are very grateful to be able to include the loans register of Craigston Castle, in Turriff, Aberdeenshire by kind permission of William Urquhart, the current laird. Warm thanks are due also to Sandra Cumming, who is joining the project as […]
The (Huge!) Borrowing Records of St Andrews
One of the most interesting aspects of the ‘Books and Borrowing’ project is the diversity of the libraries we are dealing with. Our fourteen (soon, perhaps, to be fifteen – watch this space!) target libraries with surviving borrowing registers range from community institutions in small towns to major collections based at the ancient universities. This […]
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 […]