2014 was a fairly eventful year in Scotland; over this period, colleagues and I were working in co-operation with the British Library, National Library of Wales and Bodleian Library, to select and create archived versions of sites in two webarchive collections: Commonwealth Games Glasgow 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum At the same time, Generation: 25 Years […]
Category: Digital resources
New tools for the Digital Gallery
Today we are excited to launch a new interface which provides you with a suite of tools to better research, use, share and enjoy more than 730,000 images from our Digital Gallery. You can now easily zoom in and out and pan across images, examining them at an extraordinary level of detail, flip through the […]
Rare Book Electronic Resources
When you register with the National Library of Scotland you have free access to an extensive range of electronic resources. If your main address is in Scotland you can also use many of these resources from any computer outwith the National Library simply by logging into your Library account. Among these resources are two that […]
Iconic Jet Aircraft display
To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the first commercial flight by Concorde from Heathrow to New York, I created a display celebrating iconic jet aircraft on the mezzanine level of the General Reading Room. This focuses on Concorde, the Vulcan, Red Arrows, Tornado, Harrier and Typhoon jets. The first 3 being the most iconic. The […]
The music behind our Staffa display (17-27 August 2017)
In the 19th century many composers, including Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809-1847), were inspired by Scottish literature to write music based on Scottish themes. The main influences were Ossian, Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott. Most major composers did not visit Scotland in person and so the inspiration remained cultural. However, Mendelssohn was one of the few […]
Using the Library’s open-source map viewers
Are you interested in creating a web-mapping viewer or application? Do any of the Library’s web-mapping applications have functions or interfaces you need? If the answer to these questions is yes, then you may be interested to know that the code behind all of our web-mapping applications is available for free and easy onward use […]
Utopian Nostalgia: Murray Grigor’s Space and Light (1972)
“The twentieth century began with utopia and ended with nostalgia.” Svetlana Boym One of the Moving Image Archive’s treasure troves is a collection of films produced for Films of Scotland, an agency set up by John Grierson for the Empire Exhibition of 1938 to make films promoting Scotland’s social, cultural and industrial heritage to the […]
Discover the work of Scottish poet Marion Angus
Marion Angus is a fine lyrical poet, most of whose work was written in the Scots language. Kathleen Jamie has said of Marion Angus “She has an authentic voice straight out of the ballad tradition, an eerie shimmer to her best poems”. Since her death her poems have gone in and out of print while […]
Lost Glasgow: The Changing Face of Charing Cross
Earlier this year plans were unveiled to cover a stretch of the M8 motorway at Glasgow’s Charing Cross – to ‘heal the wound’ (as the Herald calls it) opened up in the city as the road was constructed in the 1960s. The National Library of Scotland’s Moving Image Archive (housed here at Kelvin Hall) holds more than […]
Frustration, Fascination and Film Identification
From first viewing, it’s nothing very much to look at, a rather grainy piece of silent colour film lasting just under two minutes. Simply recorded as (Lifeboat Launch) the film was dated rather vaguely as ‘1950s’ with an ‘unknown location’. Time to send in the cataloguers.