Category: Project Team
The Royal High School of Edinburgh and the University of Edinburgh
I’ve been so delighted to get started with the Books and Borrowing team and have really enjoyed getting stuck in and learning all about the project’s Content Management System (CMS) and what’s been achieved so far. ‘Books and Borrowing’ is a project close to my heart as my PhD focused on the pupil borrowing records […]
Transcription Tales: The Visitors of Innerpeffray
Transcription is essential for most archival research and can be both a very enjoyable and frustrating activity. It is incredibly satisfying to read a piece of old handwriting and work out what it means and how it can help you with your research – alternatively, coming across handwritten text that you cannot decipher is infuriating. […]
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 […]
Visitors at Innerpeffray Library: J.M Barrie, George Bernard Shaw and Adam White
Exploring the history of reading, libraries, and historical tourism, I am one of the new researchers on the Books and Borrowing project, undertaking my PhD with Innerpeffray Library and the University of Stirling. My work continues the story of Innerpeffray Library from another PhD thesis published in 2018, looking into how the library was used […]
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, […]
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 […]
Book: Dialectics of Improvement: Scottish Romanticism, 1786-1831
Having now officially come on board with ‘Books and Borrowing’ (hooray!) and by way of introduction, I’d like to use this first blog post to say a few words about my recently published monograph and how it relates to the project research. While our team collectively works to gather, process and analyse historic borrowing data […]