With the 94th Academy Awards upon us at the end of March, what better time to explore the Library’s film collections and discover a few unexpected connections to the Oscars… A trio of Scottish ‘Best Live Action Shorts’ Seawards the Great Ships (1960) was the first Scottish film to win an Oscar, for best Live […]
Tag: Glasgow

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 […]

Zoom into Glasgow City
Collated by Jamie McIntosh. The final local authority area of our current Zoom Into series takes us to Glasgow, Scotland’s most populous city. Glasgow is situated in the west of the central belt area of the lowlands, and its city centre is dominated by the River Clyde. Glasgow’s position provides easy access to the greenery of the Loch […]
Pride of Islands
Blog written by Gordon Park, Film Curation student at the University of Glasgow As part of my MSc Film Curation course I have been undergoing a placement with the Moving Image Archive at the National Library of Scotland. The outcome of my placement will be two screening events at Kelvin Hall that focus on Scotland’s […]

Happy Birthday Beano!
The Beano is Britain’s longest running comic and celebrated its 80th birthday on 30th July 2018. So a slightly belated happy birthday. We did though throw a party for the Beano at our Kelvin Hall premises in Glasgow on Saturday the 28th of July. We showed for one day only our copy of Beano issue […]

Talwin Morris: Book Design and the Glasgow School at the Turn of the 20th century
My name is Kathryn Hillman. I’ve just completed a postgraduate internship within Rare Books Collections as part of my MSc in Art in the Global Middle Ages at the University of Edinburgh. I spent most of my time here at the National Library working on the Provenance Project, researching and identifying the previous ownership history of rare books […]

Memories of Kelvin Hall
On Wednesday the 27th of September the fantastic Lost Glasgow held an event at Kelvin Hall taking visitors on a ‘photographic daunder from Finnieston to Partick Cross’ One week on, I thought it would be interesting to explore the memories my colleagues and I hold as we are celebrating our first birthday in this amazing building. To […]

The pulp novels of Nat Karta
One of the main aims of the National Library of Scotland is to collect a copy of every book published in the United Kingdom and in particular every book published in Scotland. Inevitably we miss a few items. Recently we were delighted to plug a small hole in our collections dating from the late 1940s […]

‘Paint with light’ : Photography and the Moving Image Archive
According to the enthusiastic narration on ‘Amateur Cinematography’ held by the Moving Image Archive, photography serves two distinct purposes; ‘first as a form of record and second as a form of art’. This fascinating 3 minute film, shot in 1948, was made as a trailer for the 10th Amateur film festival held at the Cosmo Cinema, now known […]

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 […]