In August 1932 a new Scottish literary star was born when the novel “Sunset Song” by Lewis Grassic Gibbon was published. An instant critical and commercial success it was reprinted multiple times that year in the UK as well as being published in North America and quickly translated into other European languages. Gibbon’s novel tells […]
Category: Digital resources
Politics, publicity and potatoes: Scotland’s tattie howking films
Dr Emily Munro, National Library of Scotland Moving Image Archive Watch our video ‘Tattie Howkin’ Today commercial potato crops are usually gathered by machines but, in the past, the job of lifting potatoes from the soil was done by hand. The Scottish potato harvest once employed thousands of men and women (often migrant workers from […]
Happy 60th Birthday Ian Rankin
Today marks the 60th birthday of the UK’s number one best-selling crime writer, Ian Rankin. To celebrate Mr. Rankin’s latest milestone, we thought it appropriate to dedicate this post to his other love: music.
Archiving Scotland’s response to COVID-19
If you look at traditional media such as newspapers and magazines just now it often feels like everything is about coronavirus. The National Library of Scotland as you would expect will collect the newspapers, official publications and magazines that appear during the pandemic and when they are published the inevitable books that will chronicle this […]
Sunset Song is now available to read on our website
We have just made available all the books published by James Leslie Mitchell (1901-1935) during his lifetime on our website. Included are the three novels he published under the pseudonym Lewis Grassic Gibbon namely “Sunset Song” (1932); “Cloud Howe” (1933) and “Grey Granite” (1934) which are collectively known as “A Scots Quair”. http://digital.nls.uk/lewis-grassic-gibbon-books You can […]
Map of the Month: St Kilda
Our Map of the Month for August is the first detailed survey of St Kilda, published 1928. Although published by the Ordnance Survey, the surveying of this map was completed by a 73 year-old retired explorer and surveyor, assisted by a young geology student from the University of Edinburgh.
Gaining Column Inches: Newspaper Production
As any experienced family history researcher will tell you, the National Library of Scotland provides access to several newspaper eResources. If you’ve ever tried researching an ancestor, details of a particular historical place or event, you’ll know that archives such as The Scotsman Digital Archive and British Newspaper Archive feature 18th and 19th century newspapers […]
Geocoding the Stevenson Maps and Plans of Scotland
Written by Rachel Dishington, Collaborative Doctoral Partnership PhD student at the University of Edinburgh The Stevenson family of engineers worked extensively throughout Scotland during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their work focused primarily on coastal engineering projects, particularly harbours including at Peterhead as shown below. Most famously, they were responsible for the construction and […]
Scotland from above – our 3D map viewer with new vertical exaggeration
In early 2016 we launched our 3D map viewer, allowing our georeferenced maps to be viewed from a bird’s-eye perspective. This combines our historic map layers with elevation data, so that they can be draped and visualised across a real landscape in three dimensions. Whilst the viewer has been popular, we have recently added a […]
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 […]