Cataloguing is a relatively straightforward task- a book is examined, described, and any provenance is indicated and traced where possible. Usually, there are two trains of research: the facts of the book- its title,…
Dr Sandra Toffolo, Postdoctoral Research Assistant in the School of History, takes a look at John Lesley’s De illustrium foeminarum in republica administranda, ac ferendis legibus authoritate libellus (‘Book about the…
Postdoctoral Research Assistant (and former Lighting the Past Cataloguer), Drew Thomas, highlights the St Andrews University Library’s 1529 edition of Luther’s preface to the Psalter, Praefatio nova, D, Martini Lvte.…
The Lighting the Past team share their highlights from the ‘M’ section of the Copyright Deposit Collection. You can see the previous posts in the series here. While cataloguing the ‘M’ classmark (music) of the…
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a Special Collections Division in possession of good books, must have a backlog of unaccessioned material”. Okay, so this perhaps doesn’t quite roll off the tongue like the…
Recently, the Lighting the Past Team came across this inscription in a Greek language textbook: The discovery of this annotation provides a perfect opportunity to highlight the connections between William Tullis and…
Here, our Lighting the Past team complete the story of their recent adventures uncovering the story of one of our new finds. Provenance of a 16th century Parisian sammelband At some point during the sixteenth century,…
Here two of our Lighting the Past project cataloguers retrace their exciting journey of discovery as they uncover the story of one of our new finds. Like any great detective story, this one begins on quite an ordinary…
Once again external funding for a cataloguing project (the Henderson Bequest) has thrown into the light another hidden gem in the Special Collections of the Library of the University of St Andrews. The item under…
This is what buried treasure looks like in a library: This book, which is a collection of two perfectly respectable but not very rare tracts by Vatican Librarian Agostino Steuco, has acted as a vessel, a treasure…