A Whole New World Like most Edinburgh residents I, at times, get frustrated at how busy the city centre gets, but I’m really starting to miss those crowds. The first indication that my working life would soon be drastically different came on Saturday 14 March. Having dashed to the supermarket before starting a Saturday shift […]
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 […]
#LetterstotheLibrary
Heading for the Hills I am a manuscripts curator in the Manuscripts & Archives Research Collection in the Library of Trinity College, the University of Dublin. Trinity responded very swiftly to the Covid19 crisis by closing down on 13 March. The ‘act first ask questions later’ approach, vital under the circumstances, left some difficult tidying […]
eResources at the National Library of Scotland
What are eResources? eResources (electronic resources) are materials in digital format. These include things like electronic journals, e-books and online databases. Our eResources cover a wide of range of subjects, from history and social sciences to newspapers and business resources. The Library pays subscriptions for these eResources, which in turn, enables us to offer them […]
#LetterstotheLibrary
It’s very strange to find yourself working from home when your job is mostly customer service orientated, but this is the situation I find myself in. I work in the National Library of Scotland’s General Reading Room, where my job is to help readers access the Library’s collections and answer their enquiries. As a lot […]
Mapping Around: Introducing Denoyer-Geppert’s Globe Gores
Examine a terrestrial globe and what do you see? A fascinating model of how we view the world? A historical snapshot of the various landmasses and water features we have encountered? Or are globes a political narrative reflecting the creator’s point of view?
Setting up a web-mapping interface for the Stevenson Collection
Written by Rachel Dishington, Collaborative Doctoral Partnership PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, and Chris Fleet, Map Curator. In a previous blog post, we described in detail the process of geocoding the Library’s Stevenson maps and plans of Scotland. This process generated a file that linked metadata describing over 2000 maps and plans to […]
Map of the Month: Planning a Capital City
Planning of a New “Federal City” After the success of the American Revolution, Americans were faced with a decision: where to build their capital. In a foreshadowing of future conflict, the main debate was whether this monumental city should be built in the North of the South. The South was unhappy with economic decisions after […]
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 […]
Digitising the Library’s Maps
By: Gabi Migdalska (Specialist Digital Production Operator ) and Rosemary Hall (Maps Assistant) The National Library of Scotland holds well over 1.5 million maps and counting. The collection ranges from manuscripts to single fold-out maps in books to Ordnance Survey series containing 1000s of sheets. Holding such extensive collections puts the Library in a unique […]