After beginning on the 7th November 2013, the Lighting the Past Team has finally finished the general Reserve Collection, 54 weeks later, on the 21st November 2014. The fifth and by far the largest collection we’ve…
More than any other poet of late medieval Scotland, Gavin Douglas delighted in writing about the books he had read: the reputations of their authors, the errors he found in them, the opinions of their commentators,…
I am ashamed to say that, despite being a long-term traveller on the East Coast Main Line and spending much of my doctorate on trains between Edinburgh and Aberdeen, I had never used the Special Collections in St…
Part III of Henry Noltie’s trip through the Western Himalayas: Sent 2nd September 2014 In a very rainy McLeod Ganj (which would better known as McLeod Grunge), named after Donald McLeod, friend of Cleghorn and…
A few weeks ago we featured a guest blog from Henry Noltie who is currently retracing the journey of Hugh Cleghorn to the Western Himalaya (Following Hugh Cleghorn to the Western Himalya). Henry has sent us the…
Another in our occasional series of blogs from those using our collections in our Reading Room … For about five years I have been working on the life and work of Hugh Francis Clarke Cleghorn (1820–95), an East India…
My research on life in medieval and early modern St Andrews has given me the opportunity to work at the new Special Collections Reading Room in Martyrs’ Kirk. To the right when one enters the building is the beautiful…
In the summer of 2013, the University Library set out to capture the reactions of academic and library staff when encountering their favourite items from the Special Collections Division. For this project, authors for…
I’ve been doing some work in the stacks lately with our interns and have been focusing some attention on our 17th century reserve collections (around 5,ooo volumes) which remain largely uncatalogued. This collection is…
In every working library, each day sees a struggle played out between order and chaos. It’s a fact of life that however hard librarians work to impose order, opening the doors to users inevitably means that a measure…