Home University of Edinburgh Library Essentials
December 14, 2025
Group Study Pods on the Ground Floor
NOTICE: Works Underway
Works to the group study pods on the ground floor will take place week beginning 20th June. you will still have access to the study pods on the 1st floor throughout this time.
Main Library Foyer
How do you use the library?
The only thing that you absolutely have to know is the location of the library
Albert Einstein
We are proud of the services we offer to our students, from study spaces to books and beyond. We think the foyer of the Main Library could be a more welcoming space for everyone. We want to make sure all users can easily find what they need in this building.
There is a project underway to observe how the foyer is currently used and to see what could be improved. This work will involve tracking how people move through the building. This will be a simple and completely anonymous observation exercise. We hope that this will help us to provide an even better environment for learning in the future!
We would also love to hear your thoughts on the space! Please comment below, or contact us on Facebook or Twitter, if you have any ideas about what we could do to improve the foyer, or if you’d like to find out more about the project.
Welcome to KEW!
And we’re off! The Knowledge Exchange Week is now officially underway!
It was my pleasure to extend an official welcome and greeting from Edinburgh University Library to the fifteen delegates from across Europe. As a highly ranked and prestigious world university, we are privileged to have world-class facilities, libraries, services, collections, and staff. We are looking forward to sharing these with the delegates this week, and in learning from them and their experiences, as together we exchange professional knowledge.
If you wish to follow the week remotely, then we’re using the hashtag #EdLibKEW
Stuart Lewis (stuart.lewis@ed.ac.uk)
Deputy Director of Library & University Collections
Mission to the Middle East : discovering collections
This week New College Library welcomes delegates of the 2016 conference of the Yale-Edinburgh Group on the History of the Missionary Movement and World Christianity.
I’ve been discovering that New College Library’s unique collections include some fascinating materials from the Church of Scotland’s development of missions to Jews in the Middle East, in the nineteenth century. In particular we hold books, archives and objects relating to Rev. Andrew A. Bonar and Rev. Robert Murray McCheyne, and a selection of items from these collections are now on display in the New College Library entrance. Bonar and McCheyne were appointed by the Church of Scotland in 1838 as part of a deputation to visit Jewish communities in Europe and the Middle East, with a view to future mission activity. Read More
Cambridge University Press e-Journals and e-Books Downtime
Cambridge Journals Online, Cambridge Books Online, Cambridge Histories Online, Cambridge Companions Online, Shakespeare Survey Online and University Publishing Online will be unavailable Sunday 26th June from 9am to 1pm.
Cambridge University Press apologise for the inconvenience of this downtime and have advised that it is due to essential maintenance work ahead of the migration of content held on the above platforms to their new integrated platform branded Cambridge Core and scheduled for release mid 2016. See http://librarians.cambridgecore.org/watch-the-cambridge-core-video/ for an introduction to Cambridge Core.
Twenty’s Plenty: DataShare v2.1 Upload Upgrade
We have upgraded DataShare (to v2.1) to enable HTML5 resumable upload. This means depositors can now use the user-friendly web deposit interface to upload numerous files at once via drag’n’drop. And to upload files up to 15 GB in size, regardless of network ‘blips’.
In fact we have reason to believe it may be possible to upload a 20 GB file this way: in testing, I gave it 2 hours till the progress bar said 100%, and even though the browser then produced an error message instead of the green tick I was hoping for, I found when I retrieved the submission from the Submissions page that I was able to resume, and the file had been added.
*** So our new advice to depositors is: our current Item size limit and file size limit is 20 GB. Files larger than 15 GB may not upload through your browser. If you have files over 15 GB or data totalling over 20 GB which you’d like to share online, please contact the Data Library team to discuss your options. ***
See screenshots below. Once the files have been selected and the upload commenced, the ‘Status’ column shows the percentage uploaded. A 10 GB file may take in the region of 1 hour to upload in this way. 15 GB files have been uploaded with Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer using this interface.
Until now, any file over 1 GB had caused browsers difficulties, meaning many prospective depositors were not able to use the web deposit interface, and instead had to email the curation team, arrange to transfer us their files via DropBox, USB or through the Windows network, and then the curator had to transfer these same files to our server, collate the metadata into an XML file, log into the Linux system and run a batch import script. Often with many hiccups concerning permissions, virus checkers and memory along the way. All very time-consuming.
Soon we will begin working on a download upgrade, to integrate a means for users to download much bigger files from DataShare outside of the limitations of HTTP (perhaps using FTP). The aim is to allow some of the datasets we have in the university which are in the region of 100 GB to be shared online in a way that makes it reasonably quick and easy for users to download them. We have depositors queueing up to use this feature. Watch this space.
Further technical detail about both the HTML5 upload feature and plans for an optimised large download release are available on the slides for the presentation I made at Open Repositories 2016 in Dublin this week: http://www.slideshare.net/paulineward/growing-open-data-making-the-sharing-of-xxlsized-research-data-files-online-a-reality-using-edinburgh-datashare .
A simple interface invites the depositor to select files to upload.
A 15 GB file uploaded via Firefox on Windows and included in a submitted Item.
A 20 GB file uploaded and included in an incomplete submission.
Pauline Ward, Data Library Assistant, University of Edinburgh
New resource: Historical Statistics of the United States
I’m pleased to let you know that following a successful trial earlier this year the Library has recently purchased Historical Statistics of the United States: Millennial Edition Online.
Historical Statistics of the United States (HSUS) is a compendium of statistics about the United States and is the standard source for the quantitative facts of American history. Read More
Oxford Handbooks Online – new content purchased
We have purchased the following e-book collections to add to our existing Oxford Handbooks Online holdings:
- Archaeology – 2015, 2016 Collection
- Business and Management – 2015, 2016 Collection
- Classical Studies – 2015, 2016 Collection
- Criminology – 2015, 2016 Collection
- Economics and Finance – Foundation, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 Collection
- History – 2015, 2016 Collection
- Law – 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 Collection
- Linguistics – 2015, 2016 Collection
- Literature – 2015, 2016 Collection
- Music – Foundation, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 Collection
- Philosophy – 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 Collection
- Politics – 2015, 2016 Collection
- Psychology – Foundation, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 Collection
- Religion – 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 Collection
These new purchases now bring us fully up to date with all Oxford Handbooks Online content until the end of 2016. Title lists for the entire collection or subject specific title lists are available at http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/page/title-lists
Access
Basic records for each e-book have been added to DiscoverEd, these will be overwritten with fuller records. Additional titles will be added throughout 2016 as further titles are published.
An entry for Oxford Handbooks Online is also listed on the E-book AZ list and the Databases AZ list.
James Miranda Steuart Barry and the Crimean War
We recently became aware of a single letter from James Miranda Barry, written just before departure for Sebastopol shortly after its capture by the ‘allies’ in 1855. We acquired it in 1977.
Margaret Bulkley was born in Ireland: a bright, precocious child, she moved to London, with her mother in 1805 and there had access to General Francisco de Miranda’s library with ‘treatises such as might be considered to form a tolerably complete Medical Library for a private gentleman’. As her father had been declared bankrupt, she had no hope of a good marriage so it was decided she should go to university but this was not an option for a woman.
Taking the name of James Barry (after an uncle), Barry went to study medicine, at Edinburgh University, one of the most demanding and rigorous courses in Britain. Barry graduated with a MD thesis dedicated to patrons, General Francisco de Miranda and David Steuart Erskine, 11th Earl of Buchan (1742-1829). Then, even more extraordinary, after further training, Barry joined the army and travelled throughout the British Empire. There is no definitive version of Barry’s adopted name.
Read more about Barry on Our History
We knew about Barry’s matriculation and graduation records and MD thesis. This letter, while recorded in our sheaf index to manuscripts, had not yet made its way into our online catalogue and was stumbled upon while looking for something else. It makes interesting reading.
(Update: More recent scholarship has raised other perspectives in terms of Barry’s sex and gender. The above has therefore been edited to remove references to gendered pronouns, other than for Barry’s childhood)
Paper Conservators: News and Ideas Exchange 2016
This week’s blog post comes from Conservation Volunteers Mathilde Renauld and Paula Burbicka, who recently attended a paper conservators new and ideas exchange event at the CRC….
Scotland’s Paper Conservators gathered on May 4th 2016 for informal 5-minute presentations and socialising, hosted by the Centre for Research Collections (CRC), University of Edinburgh.
Organiser Helen Creasy (The Scottish Conservation Studio) began by enumerating the outcomes of last year’s news and ideas exchange; this year’s well attended event will also assuredly be impactful. Talks were enthusiastically received, prompting many questions and fruitful discussions.
Paper conservators at the news and ideas exchange
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....