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.
Category: Digital resources
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 […]
Getting to know the UK domain crawl
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 […]
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 […]