Latest Posts
Christmas in Kirkwall
As the festive season approaches, I thought I would write something to get us all in the mood for Christmas. This time last year, I looked at Christmas borrowings at the Library of Innerpeffray. This year, I’m going to be focussing on the Orkney Library, and reporting on what borrowers were returning to the library […]
Individual Readers at the Royal High School
One of my favourite things about working with library borrowers’ records is getting to know the individual quirks and tastes of specific borrowers. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the borrowing habits of the boys at the Royal High School began to diversify. Prior to this, a large majority visited the library to borrow […]
A First Look at the Advocates Library
We have now taken delivery of a first set of images from the borrowers’ receipt books of the Advocates Library with the permission of our partners the Faculty of Advocates and via the digitisation skills of our partners the National Library of Scotland. Our Digital Humanities Research Officer Brian Aitken has loaded these to our […]
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 […]
COP26 – Part 2: Latent Heat at the University Library
This is the second of a pair of blogs exploring environmental aspects of the study of borrowing records from historic Scottish libraries, in recognition of the globally significant COP26 conference taking place in Glasgow in November 2021. In April 1762, the Regius Professor of the Practice of Medicine at the University of Glasgow, Joseph Black, […]
COP26 – Part 1: Glasgow, Birthplace of the Anthropocene
This is the first of a pair of blogs exploring environmental aspects of the study of borrowing records from historic Scottish libraries, in recognition of the globally significant COP26 conference taking place in Glasgow in November 2021. In 1763, the Greenock-born engineer James Watt was employed as an instrument maker at the University of Glasgow. […]
The Leighton Library’s Water Drinkers: An Exhibition
When I applied for my scholarship from the Carnegie Trust earlier this year I committed to creating an exhibition displaying some of my findings. I’m so pleased to share that the exhibition has officially launched! Hurrah! It’s located in the Pathfoot Building at the University of Stirling in the A corridor (immediately to the left […]
Numbers, Focus and Prioritisation
Over the last few weeks, the Books and Borrowing team have been working on a problem of which we were aware at the outset of the project, but one that has grown in prominence as we’ve discovered more library records and added further institutions to our list while conducting our research. Our target is to […]
Novel Reading in Post-Enlightenment Scotland: a PhD
Hello! My name is Cleo O’Callaghan Yeoman, and I am delighted to be joining the Books and Borrowing team as I begin my SGSAH/AHRC-funded PhD this month, co-supervised by the Universities of Stirling and Glasgow. My PhD project centres upon analysing the relationships between novel reading and forms of ‘improvement’ within Post-Enlightenment Scotland. By combining […]
A First Look at the Aberdeen Theological Library
In 1826, the first of a series of royal commissions was established that would report on the condition and management of the Scottish universities at intervals in the nineteenth century. The range of materials gathered by the commissioners today provide historians with an extraordinary insight into the evolution of Scottish education, including the operation of […]