Tag: methodology
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]