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December 16, 2025
A Blustery Day
Following the full treatment in the CRC on Tuesday afternoon we braved the rather windy rooftop terrace to enjoy the views with a glass of something. The sun even peeked out for long enough to get the sunglasses out.
Sample Furniture – New Study Desks
The sample furniture has now started to arrive and is being displayed on the first floor Mezzanine. Below are some images of the new study desks.
We do value your feedback so please pop along, take a look and provide comments on the link below by 5.00pm on 8th July.
Uninvited Pests
In this week’s blog, Project Conservator Katharine discusses the new Integrated Pest Management Plan for the CRC Special Collections, and describes the common pests found in heritage institutions….
Integrated pest management (IPM) is the practice of monitoring for insect activity to prevent damage to collections and cultural heritage. It was originally developed by the agricultural industry to control insect populations in crop stores without continuously using pesticides. It has now been adopted by libraries and archives as a means to monitor and deter the insect pests that use organic materials present in special collections as a food source.
Main Library Collection Compression
The move of collections in the Main Library is now underway. Contract staff are working on the second floor to free up shelves which will be removed later in the summer to allow room for additional study spaces.
Thank you for your ongoing patience while the work is underway.
The empty shelves are beginning to appear!
St Cecilia’s Hall and the University of Edinburgh’s Musical Instrument Collection
Today KEW participants enjoyed a musical museums morning! We talked about our St Cecilia’s Hall Project – the University of Edinburgh’s £6.5m project to restore, renovate and make accessible Scotland’s oldest concert hall and its world class collection of historic musical instruments.
The Project will transform St Cecilia’s Hall into the UK destination for the study, display, performance and enjoyment of historic musical instruments; deliver an engagement plan based on inclusion and widening community engagement; diversify the audience through working with local organisations and schools; deliver opportunities for student involvement including curatorial activity and research; and attract more students to study our world-class collection.
The building dates to 1763 and was designed by architect Robert Mylne. When it was first opened the building made quite an impact on Edinburgh society, with one observer commenting, “I have seen no concert room equal to it either in London or Paris”. Today the building is owned by the University of Edinburgh, and houses its world-class collection of historical musical instruments. However later additions to St Cecilia’s have left the original Georgian concert hall hidden from view at the heart of the building. We are restoring and renovating the building and its facilities in order to preserve its collection and broaden its appeal to a wider public. We are redesigning the galleries, and using ibeacons, an app and mobile web technology to provide layers of contextual and technical information about the building and the collection – and enable visitor to see and hear how the instruments are played.
After the talk by Jacky MacBeath, we saw some of the musical instruments with Darryl Martin, Principal Curator of the Musical Instrument Collection. This included the 17th century Bassano violin we had heard being played in a recording earlier in the morning.
Later KEW participants enjoyed a tour of the building site, and saw St Cecilia’s Hall at a moment in this new period of its development. We viewed the elliptical concert hall with its ceiling light, the new gallery spaces that will display over 500 musical instruments, and the impressive sculptural four-floor steelwork that is the supporting structure for the new entrance, mezzanine, plant and staff areas.
We also learned about some of the goings-on in and around Niddry Street where St Cecilia’s is located including complaints in the 18th century to the council about street lighting and litter collection – nothing changes!
All KEW participants are very welcome back when St Cecilia’s Hall opens to the public in mid-February 2017.
Collections Management talk and Library Annexe tour – Hannah Mateer
On Monday 20 June I gave a talk focusing on the relationship between Collections Management projects and the development of the University Estate.
I spoke about the Law Library refurbishment at the University as an example of a current collections project which results from an Estates development. In this project we’re moving the Law Library to a temporary location for 18 months while the permanent Law School undergoes a complete refurbishment and then in December 2017 / January 2018 we’ll move the Library back to its refurbished home. As part of this move the Collections Lifecycle Management team and Law Library colleagues are managing the move of the collections and undertaking collection assessment, relegation and weeding projects.
In addition to the continual transformation of the University Estate, the ongoing management of our collections is also undertaken within the wider context of developments such as our e-preference model for new acquisitions, the increase in online distance learning, the growth of our heritage collections and our commitment to collaborative collection management with other institutions.
On Wednesday 22 June I then gave a tour of the Library Annexe, the Library’s offsite storage facility.
In addition to showing how we house some of our different collections — monographs, journals, archives, art works … harpsichords! — I spoke about the retrieval and scanning services we offer to allow access to our collections in the store.
During the tour the group discussed some of the challenges we all face in managing print collections. Some common themes were the increasing need for collaborative solutions to issues of space and retention / disposal and the need for purpose-build storage facilities to provide appropriate conditions for our valuable or unique heritage collections.
Vetstream Vetlexicon
Following a successful trial, the Library now subscribes to Vetstream Vetlexicon
Vetstream Vetlexicon Canis, Felis, Lapis and Equis (dogs, cats, rabbits and horses) services are subscription based online encyclopaedias of point-of-care clinical veterinary information. The content is provided by 900 of the world’s leading veterinary clinicians and includes more than 19,000 peer-reviewed articles on diseases and their pathogens, diagnostic tests, medical and surgical treatments as well as breeds and owner factsheets and images, videos and heart sounds. The content is categorised into 30 body systems and disciplines and cross-linked to each other. This allows the veterinarian to move between all the relevant information relating to a particular case, enabling them to diagnose, treat and effectively communicate all the relevant information to the owner.
Features include
- Updated weekly
- Search function that searches across all four services (dog, cat, rabbit and horse) to enable a comparative approach
- Diagnostic images, sound and video
- Owner factsheets to support your communication with owners
- Detailed formulary so you can prescribe with confidence
- Direct links to PubMed and VetMed Resource
- Free Monthly newsletters
- RSS & Twitter feeds of updated content
Vetstream Vetlexicon can be accessed via DiscoverEd and the Veterinary Medicine Databases A-Z list.
Meet the Project Digitisation team!
We’re now almost two month’s into the PhD thesis digitisation project. Find out a bit more about the project digitisation team below!
The Project Digitisation team: Michael, Paul, Fiona, Aoife , Giulia
Fiona
I am Fiona Mowat and I have worked at Edinburgh University since 2009 in various different capacities, including as a Shelving Assistant and as a Rare Books Cataloguing intern. Having recently completed my PhD in Roman Art and Archaeology, I am keen to expand my knowledge in the fields of Library and Museum Collections and in particular Digitisation – this connects to my archaeological fieldwork experience and speciality in finds processing and imaging.
I love to catalogue and really enjoy enabling library users to discover material that they had no idea existed. It is great, in this role, to preserve other people’s PhD theses in an electronic form so that their research is discoverable and will continue to make a scholarly impact many years or decades on!
Aoife
I studied English and History in University College Cork and later pursued a Master’s degree in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Society at the University of Edinburgh, from which I graduated last year. Throughout my studies I benefited hugely from digital collections, be it an eighteenth-century travel guide or a student magazine from the early twentieth century. During my studies I worked in different roles in different libraries, handling material as diverse as ephemera from the recent independence referendum to musical instrument mouthpieces.
The theses we are working with are equally diverse, ranging from polar exploration to potato tubers (a surprisingly popular topic), I am excited to be part of the team digitising this diverse and fascinating collection.
Giulia
I have always (academically and professionally) worked closely with heritage and library collections. Before starting this post at here at the University, I worked at the National Galleries of Scotland as a digitisation assistant, seconded at the National Library of Scotland and volunteered for a variety of cultural organisations.
Digitisation gives you the unique opportunity to work with both the physical and digital items; it exposes you to the breadth, uniqueness and heterogeneity of the collection. I am looking forward to understanding what collections and artefacts, such as PhD theses, can tell us about, not only academic subjects, but also practices of the university, topic-trends and gender.
So far we have digitised all sorts of work, from thesis on the chemical qualities of potatoes to ones on the evolution of foot-binding in China. A particular favourite of mine is Raymond Mills’s ‘The Effect of Urbanisation on Health in Sierra Leone’ from 1962, as it contains maps and rare photographs of Sierra Leone’s landscape.
Paul
My name is Paul and this is my first post for the University of Edinburgh. Being a graduate from the University of Glasgow, my MSc was in Information Management and Preservation, which makes a snappy abbreviation of IMP. IMP is actually an Archives and Records Managements qualification, HATTI at the School of Humanities had the foresight a few years ago to include digital preservation into the course. This naturally involves many aspects of digitisation. Particularly relevant to this project was the 2D digitisation module.
Considering the move towards digitisation replacing traditional cataloguing work, or absorbing it, what is interesting is how Edinburgh University will utilise these digitisation workflows developed in this project for future work.
Michael
I’ve arrived at the Digitisation Project having spent six years within the University Library, working in various teams and on different projects in the Main Library and other sites. The project is different as rather than working with what’s already there, we’re seeing new technologies arrive and the job start to build around them.
KEW – gardens
KEW 2016’s action-packed schedule continued yesterday with an off-campus trip to the Library and Archives at the Royal Botanic Garden. Not wanting to miss the opportunity to find out more about the collections – which include the intriguing category, ‘Living Collections’ – I went along for the ride.
We were introduced to the Library by Head of Library Services, Lorna Mitchell, who explained some of the 400 year history of the Garden and described the variety of collections that the Library and Archives house. The Library has recently reached 10% in their programme to digitise collections, while continuing to provide over 70,000 monographs and hundreds of thousands of journals to users. Lorna showed us some of the Library’s rare and unique collections, including a letter from Charles Darwin and beautifully detailed plant drawings by Lilian Snelling, who drew at the Botanics for five years in the early 20th century.
A quick tour around the Glasshouses, by the Living Collections Curator, was a real highlight, and covered topics about the conditions needed to house the vast array of plants, from all corners of the globe, in the collections.
We were also shown around the Herbarium by Dr David Harris. The Herbarium began as a Victorian exercise in categorisation and collecting, which continued with the increasing professionalisation of the sciences. Here, we looked at flowers preserved through drying and pressing in the late nineteenth century, which we learned (to much surprise!) are sent out on loan to other institutions and are encouraged to be annotated. With permission, and after careful consideration, some scientists are even allowed to use a piece of the specimen for experimental purposes: following rehydration in boiling water, a plant will take back its original form (but not colour). However, this contrasts with present day collections policy, which dictates that plant samples are preserved through a similar manner of drying and pressing, but also photographed and GPS-tracked. To our relief, additional samples are also collected purely for the purpose of scientific experiments: no more trimming off pieces of the collections!
There’s some fascinating work underway at the Botanics, and it was brilliant to see collections from a very different perspective, and facing unique challenges: how do you categorise a plant that isn’t recognisable? How do you keep track of plants as they evolve – can we simply distinguish between ‘living’ and ‘dead’ plant collections? And how can we best preserve these collections for future use – be this practical or theoretical? We had a great afternoon pondering the significance of these, and many more questions besides – many thanks to the Botanics for taking the time to talk to us about their work.
Publisher downtime alerts
Several publishers are taking advantage of vacation time to carry out maintenance work and platform updates. The following affect our e-resources this weekend:
- Annual Reviews. On Friday June 24 – Saturday June 25 between 11:00pm and 3:00am (BST), Annual Reviews have planned routine maintenance to their website. Website content may be unavailable during this time.
- BioOne. On Friday June 24 – Saturday June 25 between 11:00pm and 3:00am (BST), BioOne have planned routine maintenance to their website. BioOne content and service will be unavailable during this time.
- Cambridge Journals Online (CJO), Cambridge Books Online (CBO), Cambridge Histories Online (CHO) Cambridge Companions Online (CCO), Shakespeare Survey Online (SSO) and University Publishing Online (UPO), will be unavailable on Sunday 26th June 2016 for 4 hours between 09:00 AM BST and 13:00 BST due to essential maintenance.
- Taylor & Francis. On Friday June 24 – Saturday June 25 between 11:00pm and 3:00am (BST), Taylor & Francis have planned routine maintenance to their websites Taylor&Francis Online (Journals) and Taylor & Francis eBooks. Taylor&Francis Online will be unavailable during this time.
Collections
Hill and Adamson Collection: an insight into Edinburgh’s past
My name is Phoebe Kirkland, I am an MSc East Asian Studies student, and for...
Cataloguing the private papers of Archibald Hunter Campbell: A Journey Through Correspondence
My name is Pauline Vincent, I am a student in my last year of a...
Projects
Cataloguing the private papers of Archibald Hunter Campbell: A Journey Through Correspondence
My name is Pauline Vincent, I am a student in my last year of a...
Archival Provenance Research Project: Lishan’s Experience
Presentation My name is Lishan Zou, I am a fourth year History and Politics student....