Category: Project News
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 […]
The Road to Westerkirk
With the tentative lifting of Covid-19 restrictions, I was recently able to conduct my first bit of Books and Borrowing fieldwork since the project officially started in June. Thanks to the generosity of the library Trustees (and with suitable precautions taken) I’ve begun to dig into the rich collections of Westerkirk Parish Library, which lies […]
Unsung Heroes
In last week’s blog, Brian Aitken wrote about importing existing datasets into our Content Management System. Two of those datasets (for the Selkirk Subscription Library and the John Gray Library at Haddington) were generously donated to the project by Vivienne Dunstan, who transcribed the borrowings and undertook substantial genealogical research on the borrowers, during the […]
Importing existing datasets
The project is bringing together data on books, borrowers and borrowings that have been transcribed by previous projects, with the aim of making these datasets cross-searchable. Our project database consists of some 23 interrelated tables and we have a Content Management System through which the project team can add and edit records for libraries, ledgers, […]
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 […]