Home University of Edinburgh Library Essentials
December 16, 2025
New to the Library: Digital archives on gender and sexuality
I’m happy to let you know that over the summer the Library purchased two digital archive collections that will be of interest to students and staff looking at gender and sexuality studies, Archives of Sexuality and Gender: International Perspectives on LGBTQ Activism and Culture and Sex and Sexuality: Research Collections from The Kinsey Insitute Library and Special Collections.
You can access both databases via the Digital Primary Source and Archives Collection guide and the Databases A-Z list. Read More
Pocketbooks from the Past
Last month I started working at the Cultural Heritage and Digitisation Service (CHDS) as a Digitisation Operator. Before joining the team, I was working on a large digitisation project at the National Collection of Aerial Photography (NCAP) where some of my colleagues were of the robotic variety, known as ‘Cobots’. Coincidentally, some of the team at the CHDS had met the Cobots as part of the Association for Historical and Fine Art Photography (AHFAP) conference last year. Read More
Welcome to Week One!
Hello, and if you’re a new student joining us for the 2023/24 academic year we look forward to meeting you in the Law Library soon!
We are Anna Richards and SarahLouise McDonald, and we are your Law Librarians. Anna works the first half of the week, SarahLouise the second, and you can reach us both by email on law.librarian@ed.ac.uk at any time.
You may have already met us at one of the several induction sessions we’ve been running over the past week or two. If you missed them you can find recordings on the Law Librarian Media Hopper Channel:
- UG Welcome to the Library & Using Legal Databases
- PG Welcome to the Library & Using Legal Databases
- PhD Sources, Materials and Bibliographies
The slides for each session are added as ‘attachments’ to the videos above. Please note that captions are automatically generated and we’ll endeavour to get them corrected over the coming month.
One session which wasn’t recorded was the Diploma Welcome to the Library session which was delivered face-to-face. If you’re a Diploma student you should already have access to the slides via your Learn pages, but if not you can find them here: Law – Diploma induction 2023.
If you’re looking for information on using the physical library, we recommend you check out the Law Library webpages and take a look at our Virtual Orientation Guide (Microsoft Sway document – other formats are available by request). We hope that you’ll get in touch with either ourselves or our colleagues on the library helpdesk by contacting EdHelp if you have any queries. See you in the library!
LibSmart: All students now automatically enrolled!
We’re very excited to let you know that from this year onwards all students at Undergraduate and Postgraduate level will automatically be enrolled in our LibSmart online information literacy course! If you’ve not encountered LibSmart before, it’s a great way to get to grips with finding and using information available to you via the Library. It’s asychronous which means you can dip in and out whenever suits you across the year, and we tend to find people use it either at the start of term when they need to start looking reading material up, or right before they start research for their assignments.
LibSmart I is our foundation level course, helping students get a good baseline in using our library catalogue, searching for reading materials for courses, and understanding the best places to go for help. We also talk about referencing and plagiarism, something students will need to understand at every level of university life.
LibSmart II is a bit more specialised – it takes a subject-specific look at different topics that people find tricky to work with, such as systematic reviews, data mindfulness and digital news sources. We walk you through different types of resource and processes for working with this information, and hopefully leave you feeling confident of where to start with your assignment or research project. We recommend you complete LibSmart I first, but if you’re feeling confident and ready to dive in to LibSmart II then you’re welcome to start wherever you like!
And if the achievement of completing a module alone doesn’t bring you joy, we also award you some lovely digital badges for each module you complete. You can save them and use them as evidence of the self-directed learning you’ve completed via LibSmart – something that could look very attractive to future employers!
Earn digital badges for every module you complete in LibSmart I and II.
To access LibSmart, simply follow these steps:
- Visit www.learn.ed.ac.uk
- Log in using your UUN (normal university username and password)
- On the left hand navigation, select ‘Organisations’
- Locate LibSmart I: Your Library Research Starts Here (2023/24) from the list, or LibSmart II: Advance your Library Research (2023/24).
- Click into the course and start working your way through!
If you would like some further information on LibSmart you can find out more on our LibSmart webpage which includes information about the modules available and a look at what previous students have found most useful about the course. Of course if you have any questions please leave us a comment or email us.
Giving Decorated Paper a Home … Rehousing Books and Paper Bindings
In the first post of this two part series, our Collection Care Technician, Robyn Rogers, discusses her Decorated Paper rehousing project. If you want to learn about the uses, production, and trade of decorated paper, you can visit the online exhibition on this collection, curated by Elizabeth Quarmby Lawrence, here. Look out for the second post in this series soon, in which Robyn will discuss mounting loose leaf papers.
Things I’ve learnt from working with the BITS Magazine by Digi Pres Intern Jasmine Patel
Re-blogged from Information Services Group: Student Employee Blog
Programme of Study and Year: 1st Year German
Intern Position: Digital Preservation Intern
Hobbies: Piano, a sprinkling of violin (and soon flute!), running and tea
“Don’t assume you’ll be able to read your email if you go to the States” and other things I’ve learnt from working with the BITS Magazine this summer.
New ebooks: Hart Law 2023 collection
Welcome to the Law School to all our new students and welcome back to our returning students! You’ll be glad to know that the library has expanded it’s ebook collection ahead of the new academic year and we now have access to Hart’s 2023 Law collection.
Some highlights include:
- Agency, Morality and Law, written by Joshua Jowitt
- Public Health Crisis Management and Criminal Liability of Governments: A Comparative Study of the COVID-19 Pandemic, edited by Michael Bohlander, Gerhard Kemp, and Mark Webster
- Self-Determination in the International Legal System: Whose Claim, to What Right? written by Tom Sparks
If you have suggestions for books you’d like us to purchase for the library, students can use the Student Request A Book (RAB) service. Staff members can follow the procedure on the Library Support intranet page.
A Scottish Witness of the Great Kantō Earthquake
To mark the centenary of the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, we are publishing a blog by Ash Mowat, a volunteer in the Civic Engagement Team, which explores the archives of a Scottish survivor. The composer Sheena Tennant Kendall was resident in Japan from 1919 to 1924 and lived through the catastrophe, describing its impact in her diary and photographing the ensuing devastation. Read More
Image to Text: Exploring Text Extraction Processes in L&UC
Since April I have been an intern with the University of Edinburgh’s Cultural Heritage Digitisation Service (CHDS) and the Centre for Data, Culture and Society (CDCS), looking into text extraction processes at the University, both in library practice and thinking about how this is taught within digital scholarship. Throughout the internship I have had the opportunity to do both independent research and discussions with staff across the Library and University Collections (L&UC) to get a more in-depth understanding of text recognition processes. Read More
New trial: Oxford Encyclopedia of EU Law
You may be interested to know about a trial we have currently running for the Oxford Encyclopedia of EU Law. From the publishers’ website:
A year ago, the Oxford Encyclopedia of EU Law (OEEUL) was launched as a new product within the Oxford Public International Law (OPIL) family. Providing high-level analysis of European Union law by specialized distinguished contributors, OEEUL articles define, explain, and analyze EU law’s key legal concepts in an accessible yet profound way. It is a source of great pride for the OEEUL team that in its first year, the encyclopedia has grown from the initial 100 entries to its current 131 articles – with the team dedicated to increasing this content by tenfold in the coming years to eventually cover the entire EU legal order.
This database is offered via the Oxford Public International Law (OPIL) platform, where we also subscribe to the Max Planck Encyclopedias of International Law, and the Oxford Reports on International Law; both key resources for research and study.
The trial for the Oxford Encyclopedia of EU Law runs from 16th August to 16th October 2023, and the databases can be accessed via the E-resources trials page. Please have a look at the content provided and let us know what you think using the Trial feedback form. All comments will help us decide whether to subscribe to this resource going forward.
Collections
Hill and Adamson Collection: an insight into Edinburgh’s past
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Cataloguing the private papers of Archibald Hunter Campbell: A Journey Through Correspondence
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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
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