National Library Of Scotland Research Articles

Caveat Emptor: The Curious Case of Scotland’s Astorga Collection

Abstract The Astorga Collection comprises 3,716 pre-1800 volumes and forms part of the Special and Named Printed Collections at the National Library of Scotland. This article revisits the nineteenth-century historical narrative surrounding the events that saw part of the Astorga library taken from Spain to France, the result of political pressures, and sold in England to raise funds, focusing attention upon the purchase to understand how the Faculty paid the princely sum of £3,000 for what it believed was some seven thousand volumes only to receive fewer than half that. Use is made of hitherto unexplored archival sources to illuminate the involvement of King Fernando VII in relaxing mayorazgo to help the Marquis clear his debts, and the involvement of the Scottish publisher Archibald Constable (1774-1827) in the Faculty’s purchase, and how a misunderstanding in the Scottish chapter of this collection's history may have resulted in the costly mistake.

Hygrothermal Performance of Enclosures in a Storage Room and Energy Efficiency in Environmental Control

ABSTRACT This study aims to provide energy-efficient strategies for collections care in the face of financial and environmental challenges. Focusing on paper-based enclosures in storage rooms, the research proposes strategies to enhance energy efficiency by relaxing tight environmental controls. The five-stage process began with a standard test of hygrothermal properties and buffering capacity of the enclosures. In the second stage, a computer model was developed using the first stage results. This model was used in a series of specially designed tests simulating the transient heat, air, and moisture transfer between the room and enclosure to determine an acceptable room environment in which the enclosure conditions could meet collections care standards. The modelling results were used, in the third stage, to develop an AI model that predicted the enclosure conditions using room temperature and relative humidity (RH) inputs. In the final stage, a model for energy consumption of air-conditioning system operations was developed to predict across various control accuracies. Results indicate that the tight maintenance of room RH levels can be relaxed from 47–53% to 33–65%, with a corresponding reduction in energy consumption of approximately 16–18%. This relaxation, while maintaining enclosure conditions in line with conservation standards, was demonstrated through a simulation case at the National Library of Scotland. This study underscores the broader applicability of the developed procedure, asserting its relevance for cultural institutions seeking energy-saving potential through customized enclosure models.

New Perspectives on Byron and Godwin: The View from the Archives

ABSTRACT A manuscript copy in Charles Clairmont’s hand of an unpublished letter of Byron to Catherine, Lady Mackintosh dated 17 May 1814 has recently been uncovered at Keats-Shelley House, Rome. The letter is part of an exchange that also involved William Godwin, for whom Byron expresses his esteem, and it provides evidence of a hitherto unrecorded attempt of the latter to ease Godwin’s financial situation by interceding with John Murray on his behalf, nearly two years before he resolved to cede part of the copyrights of The Siege of Corinth and Parisina to the philosopher. The new episode is reconstructed in the article, which includes a transcription of the copy of Byron’s letter and all extant related correspondence held at Keats-Shelley House and the John Murray Archive at the National Library of Scotland.

Sgeul/Story The National Library of Scotland, until 20 April 2024

Sgeul/Story The National Library of Scotland, until 20 April 2024

Helping the School: Electronic Learning Resources of Foreign Libraries

The transition from an information society to a knowledge society gives libraries a chance to overcome the crisis by transforming themselves into educational institutions of a new type, providing quality information and educational services that promote cognitive and creative activities. An important place among them belongs to programs and projects for the creation and promotion of electronic learning resources intended for schoolteachers and students, i.e. for the audience, which directly determines the society we will have to live in the near future. The aim of the article is to consider the experience of major foreign libraries in preparing electronic learning (e-Learning) resources for schools from the perspective of their possible use by Russian libraries in the light of the tasks set to strengthen the role of cultural and educational organizations in the historical and cultural enlightenment and upbringing of the growing generation. The object of the article is the resources of own generation (or created in cooperation with other institutions) of national and regional libraries in the USA, Great Britain, and Australia, related to the methodological support of the educational process in schools. The study of the content of these resources made it possible to identify several main groups with different purposes: training in the skills of working with primary sources; promotion of classical literature and reading; assistance to subject teachers in their work with current social and political issues; development of regional / local history knowledge. Examples explored are electronic learning resources for schools posted in dedicated sections or on the web portals of the Library of Congress (USA, Washington), the National Library of Australia, the British Library, the Florida State Library and Archives, the State Library of Victoria (Australia, Melbourne) the National Library of Scotland, and the National Library of Wales. The study has shown that national and regional libraries of the above-mentioned countries place a high priority on the preparation of electronic learning resources for schools. Creation of such resources helps libraries to solve important tasks: to popularize their collections and electronic resources; to expand the circle of regular readers by attracting schoolchildren; to enhance the prestige of the library as an important cultural and educational institution involved in forming the worldview and raising the intellectual level of the younger generation. Due to their social significance, such projects, as a rule, have state or regional funding; grants are widely practiced. The article pays special attention to the interaction between libraries and other cultural institutions in preparing joint electronic learning resources for schools, as well as to the promotion of such resources among the teaching community, primarily through close cooperation with pedagogical organizations.

Informants, Spies and Agents of the British Ambassador to Catherine's Russia

The goal of the article is to clarify the channels of information about the Russian Empire used by the British Ambassador Charles Cathcart in St. Petersburg in 1768—1772. On the base of mostly unpublished documents from the British National Archive and the private Cathcart archive stored in the National Library of Scotland, it can be concluded that with the limited staff of the British Embassy in St. Petersburg, in the absence of a network of secret paid agents, the ambassador could rely mainly on his personal observations and on the inquiries of compatriots invited to the Russian service. Although the ambassador achieved confidential permanent contacts with count N. I. Panin, using a mutually beneficial exchange of secret data obtained through diplomatic channels of the two countries, and managed to “buy” Panin’s employee Caspar Saldern, according to the political results, Cathcart’s mission to Russia is still considered unsuccessful. However, the ambassador's close personal relations with the Empress and her inner circle contributed to the strengthening of British cultural influence at the top of Russian society and the preservation of mutual interest, both in the economic and political fields.

Two Lost Items of Humeana

Abstract This note reports on the disappearance of two items associated with the philosopher David Hume (1711–1776). The first item, formerly preserved in the National Library of Scotland, is a portion of a manuscript: the Register of the Proceedings of the Curators and Keeper of the Library of the Faculty of Advocates. The portion concerns the period during which Hume held the Keepership of the Library. The second item, formerly preserved in the National Museums of Scotland, is one of only two extant copies of Hume’s supressed Five Dissertations (1755–6).

Did Burns send Cannon to France in 1792? – A New Theory of the Narrative

The story of Burns sending carronades to revolutionary France in 1792 first appears in the biography by John Gibson Lockhart (1828). An analysis of the extant evidence, including documents in the National Library of Scotland, suggests the unlikelihood of the narrative and it may be that its origins lie in the real-life events surrounding Professor John Anderson (1726–96) who did take ordnance to France in 1791.

Exploring National Library of Scotland datasets with Jupyter Notebooks

The National Library of Scotland’s Digital Scholarship Service has been releasing collections as data on its data-delivery platform, the Data Foundry, since September 2019. Following the COVID-19 lockdown, this service experienced significantly higher traffic, as library users increasingly made use of online resources. To ensure that as many users as possible were able to explore the datasets on the Data Foundry, the Library invested in a Digital Research Intern post, with a remit to provide introductory analysis of the Data Foundry collections using Jupyter Notebooks. This article provides a case study of this project, explaining the Library’s work to date around its new Digital Scholarship Service and releasing datasets on the Data Foundry; the reasoning behind the decision to begin to provide Jupyter Notebooks; the Notebooks themselves and what types of analysis they contain, as well as the challenges faced in creating them; and the publication and impact of the Notebooks.

The Advocates Library, Edinburgh

AbstractIn this article Sara Berry provides an account of some of the history relating to the Advocates Library in Edinburgh. She explains how the Advocates Library played a key role in the Scottish Enlightenment and acted as Scotland's national library up to the foundation of the National Library of Scotland in 1925. The article also looks at the library's integral role in supporting Faculty Members and the Scottish justice system through history to modern day. The last section looks at some of the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on Members, library staff and working practices.

A ‘world of method and intrigue’: Muriel Spark's Literary Intelligence

In 1944, Muriel Spark was recruited by the Foreign Office to work as a Duty Secretary in the Political Warfare Executive at Milton Bryan. ‘I played a very small part,’ Spark wrote in her autobiography, ‘but as a fly on the wall I took in a whole world of method and intrigue in the dark field of Black Propaganda or Psychological Warfare, and the successful and purposeful deceit of the enemy.’ Drawing on research in Spark's personal and literary archives at the McFarlin Library, Tulsa, and the National Library of Scotland, this essay explores the ways in which this ‘world of method and intrigue’ is taken in and reformulated in Spark's writing. Political espionage takes centre-stage in several of Spark's fictions, and a preoccupation with secrecy and spying runs through her work. But the methods of black propaganda can also be read as a secret sharer of some of Spark's most characteristic aesthetic strategies. Focusing in particular on Spark's most direct treatment of her secret war work – The Hothouse by the East River – critical tension centres on reading Spark's literary intelligence less as a re-enactment than as a subversion of the logics of disinformation.

Transparency, provenance and collections as data


 ‘Collections as data’ has become a core activity for libraries in recent years: it is important that we make collections available in machine-readable formats to enable and encourage computational research. However, while this is a necessary output, discussion around the processes and workflows required to turn collections into data, and to make collections data available openly, are just as valuable. With libraries increasingly becoming producers of their own collections – presenting data from digitisation and digital production tools as part of datasets, for example – and making collections available at scale through mass-digitisation programmes, the trustworthiness of our processes comes into question. In a world of big data, often of unclear origins, how can libraries be transparent about the ways in which collections are turned into data, how do we ensure that biases in our collections are recognised and not amplified, and how do we make these datasets available openly for reuse? This paper presents a case study of work underway at the National Library of Scotland to present collections as data in an open and transparent way – from establishing a new Digital Scholarship Service, to workflows and online presentation of datasets. It considers the changes to existing processes needed to produce the Data Foundry, the National Library of Scotland's open data delivery platform, and explores the practical challenges of presenting collections as data online in an open, transparent and coherent manner.

Archival strategies for contemporary collecting in a world of big data: Challenges and opportunities with curating the UK web archive

In this contribution, we will discuss the opportunities and challenges arising from memory institutions' need to redefine their archival strategies for contemporary collecting in a world of big data. We will reflect on this topic by critically examining the case study of the UK Web Archive, which is made up of the six UK Legal Deposit Libraries: the British Library, National Library of Scotland, National Library of Wales, Bodleian Libraries Oxford, Cambridge University Library and Trinity College Dublin. The UK Web Archive aims to archive, preserve and give access to the UK web space. This is achieved through an annual domain crawl, first undertaken in 2013, in addition to more frequent crawls of key websites and specially curated collections which date back as far as 2005. These collections reflect important aspects of British culture and events that shape society. This commentary will explore a number of questions including: what heritage is captured and what heritage is instead neglected by the UK Web archive? What heritage is created in the form of new data and what are its properties? What are the ethical issues that memory institutions face when developing these web archiving practices? What transformations are required to overcome such challenges and what institutional futures can we envisage?

The Diplomatic Ceremonial at the Court of Catherine II

Referring to relevant approaches to the study of diplomatic culture and the semiotics of gestures, this article examines the significance of kissing the sovereign’s hands in diplomatic ceremonies in western Europe, and, more particularly, in Britain and Russia. Confusion and disagreement over the meaning of this gesture could become a major stumbling block in the evolution of Anglo-Russian relations at the very moment when there was a willingness to become closer owing to the expanding sphere of mutual political interests. With the arrival of the British ambassador Charles Cathcart and his wife in Russia in 1768, the ceremony of the first audience of the ambassador and (especially) the ambassadress with the sovereign was the subject of intense negotiations in the highest echelons of power. The discussion focused on the act of kissing the sovereign’s hands. A gesture that in Russia had long been considered a sign of the monarch’s mercy towards the ambassador of another Christian state might seem an acknowledgement of subordination or submission to the Scottish Lord Cathcart. The tradition had no parallel in the diplomatic ceremonies of other European courts. Why did the Russian government, which sought to match diplomatic ceremonies at the court with Western European protocols, not compromise when it came to this formality? How did the key persons of the story – Cathcart and Count Nikita Panin – evaluate the possible consequences of not carrying out the required ceremonial protocols? What concessions and violations were the two sides prepared for in these disputes over ceremony in the name of “high politics”? Referring to archival materials from the National Archives of the United Kingdom, the personal papers of the Cathcart family kept in the National Library of Scotland, and several published dispatches of British representatives in Russia, the author studies the reflections of Lord and Lady Cathcart on their introduction to Empress Catherine II. The analysis leads the author to conclude that Catherine II perceived the kissing of the sovereign’s hands as an indispensable prerequisite for starting any diplomatic mission and as a historically established gesture that demonstrated the grandeur of the crown. Negotiations over the act of hand-kissing in 1768 showed that this ceremonial detail was not a mere formality but could become the key factor in the success of an ambassador’s mission.

The importance of local history for nurses: An Aboriginal Australian microhistory

BackgroundHistorical trauma related to phenomena such as invasion, colonisation and racial oppression can have long lasting effects on the social and emotional wellbeing of communities. AimThis paper aims to show the importance of nurses increasing familiarity with the local history of communities they work in. MethodsA microhistory approach is used to explore research conducted on the skull of Aboriginal Australian man, Cannabayagal, at the University of Edinburgh in the early nineteenth century. Initial data was gathered through a review of historical literature focussed on the Appin Massacre, and the early nineteenth-century psychological system known as Phrenology. Hand searches of local library collections at Camden, Campbelltown, and Liverpool, along with the archives of the State Library of NSW, and the State Records Authority of NSW, were accompanied by online searches using databases such as Psych Info, PubMed, and Google Scholar. Primary documents outlining the study of Cannabayagal's skull were accessed through online databases of Edinburgh University and the National Library of Scotland. FindingsIn 1816, as part of the Appin Massacre that took place in the south-west of colonial NSW, the head of Aboriginal Australian man Cannabayagal was cut off, sold, and then shipped to Edinburgh University in Scotland. There, Cannabayagal’s skull was studied and written about in ways that reflected false science and supported racist ideology. DiscussionThe Appin Massacre is memorialised with a local Aboriginal Australian ceremony every year, and the accompanying historical trauma is still felt by the local community. Microhistories like the one presented in this paper hold the potential to increase nurses empathy for communities they work in and may improve nurses’ abilities to critique and challenge current day abuses of scientific power and position. ConclusionLocal community microhistories have the potential to inform nurses’ delivery of trauma-sensitive, patient-focused interventions.

Nineteenth Century Literary Society: The John Murray Publishing Archive

Nineteenth Century Literary Society is drawn from archive of the House of John Murray publishing company, held by the National Library of Scotland. The family-run firm, with Scottish roots, spanned seven generations and flourished in London from 1768 until 2002. John Murray is especially remarkable for publishing seminal English-language works of the 19th century, including those by Charles Darwin, David Livingstone, Charles Lyell, and Samuel Smiles, the father of self-help. The largest collection of Lord Byron’s private writings and manuscripts, assembled by the publisher, form a large part of the resource. Women writers feature prominently in the John Murray’s collection, including Jane Austen, Isabella Bird, Elizabeth Eastlake, and Caroline Lamb.

Coronavirus 2020: From lockdown to resumption at the National Library of Scotland

Pandemics are nothing new to libraries. Our collections contain many works on epidemics and pestilence through the centuries. The Covid-19 pandemic forced the National Library of Scotland to deal with a public health crisis that went beyond the experience and policies of the institution. This account describes the measures taken to close the Library rapidly and to set up a staff of over 300 to homeworking. It is then explained how the Library continued working under lockdown and provided a digital service to the public. In the final section, the Library’s approach to reoccupying the buildings and resuming public services is discussed, emphasising the complex administrative and human issues involved. Finally, a short assessment of the ‘new normal’ for the National Library is posited.

Disrupting the library: Digital scholarship and Big Data at the National Library of Scotland

With a mass digitisation programme underway and the addition of non-print legal deposit and web archive collections, the National Library of Scotland is now both producing and collecting data at an unprecedented rate, with over 5PB of storage in the Library’s data centres. As well as the opportunities to support large scale analysis of the collections, this also presents new challenges around data management, storage, rights, formats, skills and access. Furthermore, by assuming the role of both creators and collectors, libraries face broader questions about the concepts of ‘collections' and ‘heritage', and the ethical implications of collecting practices. While the ‘collections as data’ movement has encouraged cultural heritage organisations to present collections in machine-readable formats, new services, processes and tools also need to be established to enable these emerging forms of research, and new modes of working need to be established to take into account an increasing need for transparency around the creation and presentation of digital collections. This commentary explores the National Library of Scotland's new digital scholarship service, the implications of this new activity and the obstacles that libraries encounter when navigating a world of Big Data.

Documenting COVID-19 at the National Library of Scotland

Documenting COVID-19 at the National Library of Scotland

New Light on Translating Arthur Koestler's The Gladiators: Unpublished Correspondence from the Edith Simon Archive

Correspondence which has come to light in the Edith Simon Archive at the National Library of Scotland concerns the translation and publication of Arthur Koestler's novel Der Sklavenkrieg in English as The Gladiators. Most of the letters were written by Koestler to the translator, Edith Simon (1917–2003), while her work was in progress. Since neither Koestler nor Simon left any detailed account of their collaboration over the translation, the letters provide new insight into the process which concluded with Jonathan Cape's publication of the English version of Koestler's novel in 1939. Koestler points to works that influenced his own writing style, and light is shed on the author-translator relationship.