Since 2014, the National Library’s Public Programmes team have been regularly working with Edinburgh College of Art (ECA) Illustration tutors and their 1st Year students on an annual collaborative project. Taking inspiration from different aspects of the National Library’s collections, the students have created Riso prints, linocuts, drawings and paper sculptures as part of their […]
Category: 20th-century items
Harry Potter and the 80 translations
The National Library of Scotland’s new Treasures exhibition in Edinburgh includes an array of translations of the first Harry Potter novel. These translations show that the Harry Potter books are a global success, published and read in almost every corner of the the world. “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” by J.K. Rowling (1997) (or […]
LGBTQ+ Representation within the Moving Image Archive
The Library’s Moving Image Archive at Kelvin Hall aims to collect films of historical value and that represent the diversity of people living and working in Scotland, as well as historical and ongoing development of screen practice in Scotland. Despite this wide scope, there’s much to be said about what’s missing. As inclusion of all […]
Our collections and the climate crisis – Fife
The Library holds millions of items- books, journals, e-books, maps, music, moving images- and these can help individuals build both practical and emotional resilience in the face of the climate crisis. Be it a map showing the effects of coastal erosion in Scotland or an e-book on climate justice or a poem deepening our relationship […]
Our collections and the climate crisis – Clyde River Basin
The Library holds millions of items- books, journals, e-books, maps, music, moving images- and these can help individuals build both practical and emotional resilience in the face of the climate crisis. Be it a map showing the effects of coastal erosion in Scotland or an e-book on climate justice or a poem deepening our relationship […]
Our collections and the climate crisis – Cairngorms
The Library holds millions of items- books, journals, e-books, maps, music, moving images- and these can help individuals build both practical and emotional resilience in the face of the climate crisis. Be it a map showing the effects of coastal erosion in Scotland or an e-book on climate justice or a poem deepening our relationship […]
Our collections and the Climate Crisis — Outer Hebrides
The Library holds millions of items- books, journals, e-books, maps, music, moving images- and these can help individuals build both practical and emotional resilience in the face of the climate crisis. Be it a map showing the effects of coastal erosion in Scotland or an e-book on climate justice or a poem deepening our relationship […]
Gil Heron, Gil Scott-Heron and their “Scottish spirits”.
This is a blog about four men, footballer Gil Heron (1922-2008), his son the musician Gil Scott-Heron (1949-2011), publisher Jamie Byng (1969-) and TV executive and football pundit Stuart Cosgrove (1952-). These men’s lives and the points where they crossed over tells us something about Scotland and its relationship with African-American culture over the last […]
Brigid Brophy takes an axe and gives English literature fifty whacks
The Library of St John’s College, Oxford used to be home to an edition of Spenser’s “The Faerie Queen” in which a discontented undergraduate had written his opinion of the books that he was obliged to read for his course. “First I thought Troilus and Criseyde was the most boring poem in English. Then I […]
Maps with a sense of the past: what are synthetic maps, and why do we love them?
by Chris Fleet, Zekun Li, Katie McDonough, and Valeria Vitale. Maps are excellent documentary sources for understanding the history of the landscape, including past human activities and former physical environments. Many organizations have scanned tens of thousands of historical maps and shared them online. For example, the Sanborn Fire Insurance Map Collection scanned by the […]