Category: Project Team
Building the Books and Borrowing Digital Resource
Over the past few months, we have been busy thinking about how we can make all the data we have been accumulating available to other people. In other words, we’ve been thinking through the eventual front-end of our database, and working out with our wonderful developer Brian Aitken what will work best in terms of […]
Metaphors of Reading, 1760-1830
For the past few weeks, Cleo and I have been working together on an article that we hope to submit for publication fairly soon. We thought we would share some initial thoughts about it on this blog. The topic of the article is metaphors that we have spotted in a variety of different works from […]
A New Chapter
In October I started work on a new project, bringing my two years as a research fellow with Books and Borrowing to an end. It’s been an exceptionally rewarding period for me intellectually, and the project and team have often felt like an island of stability in uncertain times. I’m determined to stay in touch […]
Farewell to Gerry McKeever and Alex Deans
This week, I have the sad task of bidding farewell to postdoctoral research fellows Gerry McKeever and Alex Deans. Gerry leaves the Books and Borrowing team to take up a Lectureship in Modern Scottish Literature at the University of Edinburgh, while Alex returns to the University of Glasgow to work on a research project very […]
All Together Now: Reflections on the ECSSS and BARS/NASSR conferences
It’s conference season in the academic world, and the ‘Books and Borrowing’ team were delighted to attend two conferences back to back! Despite train and bus strikes, we made it to Liverpool to attend the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society (ECSSS) conference on the theme of ‘Scots Abroad’ at the University of Liverpool. We then moved […]
The Final Year: What Goes In?
The end of Year 2 is an odd time for a project like this. We can, I think, rightly be proud of where we’ve got to despite pandemic circumstances, with over 125,000 records currently in the system. This meets our benchmark and puts us on course to reach our target of 150,000 records by the […]
Eighteenth-Century Studies at Stirling Writing Retreat
From 23-27 May 2022, several members of the Books and Borrowing team (Katie, Gerry, Maxine, Cleo, Josh, and Danni) participated in the Eighteenth-Century Studies at Stirling Writing Retreat at the beautiful Alexander House in rural Perthshire. Fifteen scholars came together to write and to support each other in that endeavour. The idea of the retreat […]
Looking Forward to 2022
The Books and Borrowing team have now returned to work after the holidays – in the first half of 2022, we’re entering a crucial stage of the project as we build out the materials we have in the system, cover the libraries we have yet to engage with in detail, conduct contextualisation and normalisation, and […]
A Signet Library Tour for the Books and Borrowing Team
The Books and Borrowing team was recently treated to a private tour of the Signet Library by our very own Kit Baston! Kit has worked with and alongside the library and archives for years, so there was no better person to show us around. Located behind St Giles Cathedral, just off the Royal Mile, the […]
The Records of the Bristol Library Society
Taking advantage of the recent loosening of Covid-19 restrictions, I was finally able to make the long trip to Bristol to access the library records which form the other half of my doctoral project. My project examines political reading and library membership at two British subscription libraries during the first three decades of the nineteenth […]