Bringing in collections Incoming university collections are routinely checked for dirt, mould and insect activity before being cleaned, rehoused and shelved in the stores. Not all collection items come from suitable…
Scottish History PhD candidate Kate McGregor has been has been working for the past year as a Research Assistant on a project investigating notaries and their networks in late medieval St Andrews, supported by generous…
We recently celebrated the publication of a novel which had waited 70 years to get into print. This is Willa Muir’s ‘new’ novel, The Usurpers. Two typed versions of the manuscript, and a few pages of a handwritten…
People in Scotland, and all around the world, will be cutting into a haggis today or lifting a wee dram to the memory of Robert Burns, our national poet. Like many Scottish libraries, St Andrews has many editions of…
The king sent his lady on the sixth Yule day, Three goldspinks, three starlings, a goose that was gray, Three plovers, three partridges, a papingo-aye; Wha learns my carol and carries it away? Goldspinks is the Scots…
The king sent his lady on the first Yule day, A papingo-aye; Wha learns my carol and carries it away? Pippin-go-aye or papingo-aye is a Scots word for parrot, though in Chambers edition of Popular Rhymes, it is…
Continuing the series of blog posts on the recent RTI (Reflectance Transformation Imaging) workshop, Phoebe MacIndoe looks at the fragments of ‘The Romances of Kyng Alisander’. The advantages to using digitised…
The Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) technique opens up new horizons for the close study of the materiality of palpable objects like manuscripts. It reveals things we cannot easily observe with our very eyes,…
At a workshop back in April I applied RTI (Reflectance Transformation Imaging) to the processing of images of a twelfth-century parchment leaf and found some details that were difficult to observe with the naked eye.…
As light glimmers over the fifteenth-century illuminated initial, the calm and focused expression on the face of our university’s eponym St Andrew remains unchanged. He seems to look directly at the shadow of a…