It’s August and the Edinburgh festival is upon us back to its raucous self, more or less, following two years of enforced, relative quiet. 2022 is the 75th anniversary of the Edinburgh International Festival. It is also seventy-five years since eight theatre groups who were not invited to participate in the International Festival turned up […]
Author: Trevor Thomson
All singing, all dancing, all poeting.
Prologue Web archiving activities by General Collections in the last six months of 2021 is representative of at least six of the Hellenistic muses – music, dancing, and poetry (dance in this context being Scottish Country and Highland). Much of the activity builds on work carried out in previous years, particularly regarding music. While earlier […]
Collecting the Fringe.
Edinburgh’s Festivals are drawing to a close for another year – the annual revels and mayhem, crowded streets, with entertainments of all kinds – from real theatrical efforts to someone on a pole dressed as Yoda (or it might be Dobby, nobody can be really sure) – exploding fireworks above the castle every night, and […]
5,000 sites archived and counting – Scottish web archiving in the UK.
At the end of August 2018 added my 5000th URL to the UK Web Archive – and despite being, at the time of writing, two months ago it is a chance to reflect on my archiving experience. I was something of a late comer to web archiving although I knew of the concept having written […]
‘He’s done it! Oh, a great goal! Oh, superb!’*
If ever a moment defined the joy and frustration of supporting Scottish international football it was probably Archie Gemmill’s World Cup goal against the Netherlands. “That” goal, in the sixty-eighth minute of their final Group 4 match played in Mendoza, Argentina, on 11 June 1978. By then, after all the hype and euphoria about being […]
Argentina here we come!
From the moment Kenny Dalglish’s head met Martin Buchan’s cross to score the second in Scotland’s last World Cup qualifier at Anfield in October 1977 there was fervent optimism that the national team was going to do something special in the coming World Cup in Argentina. Unremarkable results in the British Home Championship did […]
Modernist Periodicals at the National Library of Scotland
Guest blog by Dr Francesca Bratton Dr Francesca Bratton (Durham University) recently completed her AHRC funded PhD on Hart Crane and the Little Magazine. She was a Library of Congress Kluge Fellow in 2013-14 and is currently teaching at Durham University and is developing a project on the roots of New Criticism in literary periodicals, […]
Jim Clark
When it came to the launch of a Scottish Sports Hall of Fame in 2002 there could have been no more natural choice than Jim Clark – by any standard, a Scottish sporting great. Winner of a then record twenty-five Formula 1 Grand Prix, Clark was a respected international motor-racing superstar whose sheer skill meant […]
Fanzines here, fanzines there!
While the National Library of Scotland has the privilege to collect material published in the UK free of charge, knowing of a publication’s existence is sometimes problematic. When it comes to collecting almost ephemeral material such as Scottish football fanzines the task becomes a major challenge. In spite of this obstacle the Library has acquired […]