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April 4, 2026
Chinese calligraphy on display at New College Library
Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting. New College Library, Inglis 23.
On display in the New College Library entrance this week is the beautiful Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting (Inglis 23). This is a classic treatise of calligraphic art on silk, by calligraphers Wen-Yuan T’ang and Chin-Ch’ang in 1682.
This volume is one of the five volume set, bound in silk, which was given to New College Library in 1921 by the Rev. James W. Inglis, Missionary to Manchuria for the United Free Church of Scotland.
Building for a New Audience
A post by Sarah Deters, Audience Development Assistant, MIMED
Why is the St Cecilia’s Hall Redevelopment project so important to Musical Instrument Museums Edinburgh (MIMEd)? There are a number of reasons. Through the redevelopment, we will be able to preserve and conserve St Cecilia’s Hall, the oldest concert hall in Scotland. By expanding the building, we will finally be able to bring together our musical instrument collections into one museum, displaying our objects in new galleries and allowing us to show the history of musical instruments under one roof. And with this improved St Cecilia’s, we can engage and embrace a new audience by expanding our opening hours, improving our facilities, providing exciting public programming, and interpreting our museum objects with a fresh perspective.
The opportunity to create an engaging space for our visitors is incredibly exciting for me as the A
udience Development Assistant. Throughout the past year, I, along with the SCH Redevelopment Group and Jura Consultants, have been working hard on developing a robust Activity Plan. This plan outlines all of the programmes, relationships, and engagement opportunities that will occur at St Cecilia’s Hall. The plan has already been set in motion and will continue to gather speed throughout the redevelopment process. It is a great time to be involved with Musical Instrument Museums Edinburgh and I look forward to continuing to update everyone on the project.
New Chinese journal at New College Library
I’m pleased to be able to say that the journal Sino-Christian Studies is now available at New College Library at Per S.
Sino-Christian studies : an international journal of Bible, theology & philosophy = Han yu jidu jiao xue shu lun ping = 漢語基督敎學術論評 is a bilingual journal, published twice a year by the Institute of Sino-Chinese Studies, Chung Yuan Christian University, Taiwan.
This journal is one of a number of Chinese journals being purchased this year to support developing areas of research and teaching in World Christianity, in the School of Divinity.
Geoffrey Herbert Beale
Two weeks ago, when we posted about the Lysenko Controversy in Soviet Russia, mention was made of Geoffrey Beale’s interest in and knowledge of the Russian language and scientific history. Beale was based at the Institute of Animal Genetics in Edinburgh from 1947 until 1978 and is best known as the founder of malaria genetics. His personal archive, which takes up some 40 boxes and contains notebooks, correspondence, publications and drafts, is currently being catalogued here in Edinburgh University Library Special Collections, so a brief biography may be in order to shed some light on this humane and fascinating man.
Beale, born in Wandsworth, London in 1913, developed a keen interest in Botany while a student in Imperial College, London, despite his parents’ opposition to a scientific career (he was even made to sit a psychological examination which recommended that he become a tax inspector instead!). In his third year of university, Beale completed a summer course in plant genetics given at the John Innes Horticultural Institute, which would shape the course of his future career. Beale was eventually offered a job at the John Innes, receiving his PhD in 1938 and studying, among other things, the chemistry of flower colour variation until being called up to the army in 1941.
Due to having what he called a ‘smattering’ of languages, including Russian, Beale was drafted into the Intelligence Corps (Field Security) and posted to Archangel and then Murmansk, Russia, where he had the opportunity to improve his Russian. Beale was awarded an MBE for his military service in 1947.
After the war, Beale wondered how he would get back into science after his five year absence. Fortunately, he was offered a job at Cold Spring Harbor working with Escherichia coli. Beale also worked for a spell with geneticist Tracy Sonneborn at Bloomington, Indiana, and it was then Beale developed his lifelong interest in the protozoan Paramecium. The award of a Rockefeller Fellowship necessitated his return to the UK in 1947, where he was duly offered a lectureship by C.H. Waddington, who had just arrived in Edinburgh as director of the genetics section of the National Animal and Genetics Research Organisation within the Institute of Animal Genetics. At the Institute, Beale became close friends with Henrik Kacser and Charlotte ‘Lotte’ Auerbach, about whom he would later write an account, and gained funding to design and build dedicated research laboratories, including the Protozoan Genetics building for his research group. This group worked on the genetics of Paramecium and on protozoan parasites, and attracted visiting scientists from all over the world. Beale was appointed a Royal Society Research Professor in 1963, a position he held until his retirement.
In the mid-1960s, Beale developed an interest in malaria genetics, gaining a grant from the Medical Research Council in 1966. Together with programme leader David Walliker, who would become a renowned malariologist, they established a mosquito colony, built an insectary, collected parasite strains and established rodent facilities for African tree rats. The work of another researcher, Richard Carter, helped establish the parasite genetic markers, and the foundations of genetic analysis in malaria parasites were laid. Later research covered the genetic analysis of drug resistance, virulence and the classification of rodent malarias into species and subspecies. He continued his malaria work during a six month visiting professorship at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, establishing a collaborative research programme with Professor Sodsri Thaithong as well as a malaria research laboratory which achieved World Health Organisation Collaborating Centre status. This phase of Beale’s career laid the groundwork for many other scientists working on parasite diversity and genetics. In 1996 Beale was awarded an honorary DSc from Chulalongkorn University, one of the first foreigners to be so honoured.
Beale married Betty MacCallum in 1949 (they were divorced in 1969) and he would often take their three sons to the laboratory with him on Sundays where they would learn about science and film printing techniques. Beale continued to work at the laboratory every day well after his retirement. After 1998 he began work on a new book on Paramecium to show the advances and new directions of research in the area. However, his health was deteriorating and much of the later writing was done by co-author John Preer. The book, Paramecium: Genetics and Epigenetics, was published in 2008, when Beale was 95 years old. Geoffrey Beale died in Edinburgh on 16 October 2009.
We’ll be posting up items of interest from the Beale collection as cataloguing progresses, with the finished catalogue being mounted online on our newly-launched project website at: http://www.archives.lib.ed.ac.uk/towardsdolly/
References:
J. R. Preer Jr and Andrew Tait, ‘Geoffrey Herbert Beale MBE’, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, 57: 45-62 (2011)
Geoffrey Beale, ‘Autobiograpy (written July 1997)’, in Coll-1255, EUL Special Collections.
SCAPE workshop (notes, part 1)
The aim of the SCAPE workshop was to show participants how to cope with large data volumes by using automation and preservation tools developed and combined as part of the SCAPE project. During the workshop, we were introduced to Taverna workbench, a workflow engine we we installed with a virtual machine (Linux) in our laptops.
It has taken me a while to sort out my notes from the workshop, facilitated by Rainer Schmidt (Austrian Institute of Technology, AIT), Dave Tarrant (Open Planets Foundation, OPF), Roman Graf (AIT), Matthias Rella (AIT), Sven Schlarb (Austrian National Library, ONB), Carl Wilson (OPF), Peter May (British Library, BL), and Donal Fellows (University of Manchester, UNIMAN), but here it is. The workshop (September 2013) started with a demonstration of scalable data migration processes, for which they used a number of Raspberry Pis as a computer cluster (only as proof of concept).
Rainer Schimdt (AIT)
Here is a summary of the presentation delivered by Rainer Schmidt (AIT) who explained the SCAPE project framework (FP7 16 organizations from 8 countries). The SCAPE project focuses on planning, managing and preserving digital resources using the concept of scalability. Computer clusters can manage data loads and distribute preservation tasks that cannot be managed in desktop environments. Some automated distributed tasks they have been investigating are extraction of metadata, file format migration, bit checking, quality assurance, etc.
During the workshop, facilitators showed scenarios created and developed as part of the SCAPE project, which had served as test bed to identify best use of different technologies in the preservation workflow. The hands-on activities started with a quick demonstration of the SCAPE preservation platform and how to execute a SCAPE workflow when running it in the virtual machine.
SCAPE uses clusters of commodity hardware to generate bigger environments to make preservation tasks scalable, to distribute the power required for computing efficiently, and to minimise errors. The systems’ architecture is based on partitions. If failure occurs, it only affects one machine and the tasks that it performs, instead of affecting a bigger group of tasks. The cluster can also be used by a number of people, so only a specific part of the cluster gets affected by the error and thereby only one user.
A disadvantage of distributing tasks in a cluster is that you have to manage the load balancing. If you put loads of data into the system, the system distributes the data among the nodes. Once the the distributed data sets have been processed, the results are sent to nodes where the results are aggregated. You have to use a special framework to deal with the distribution environment. SCAPE uses algorithms to find and query the data. The performance of a single CPU is far too small, so they use parallel computing to bring all the data back together.
The Hadoop framework (open source Apache) allows them to deal with the details of scalable preservation environments. Hadoop is a a distributed file system and execution platform that allows them to map, reduce and distribute data and applications. The biggest advantage of Hadoop is that you can build applications on top, so it is easier to build a robust application (the computation doesn’t break because a node goes down or fails). Hadoop relies on the MapReduce programming model which is widely used for data-intensive computations. Google hosts MapReduce clusters with thousands of nodes used for indexing, ranking, mining web content, and statistical analysis, Java APIs and scripts.
The SCAPE platform brings the open source technologies Hadoop, Taverna and Fedora together. SCAPE is currently using Hadoop version 1.2.0. Taverna which allows you to visualise and and model tasks, make them repeatable, and use repository technology such as Fedora (http://www.fedora-commons.org/). The SCAPE platform incorporates the Taverna workflow management system as a workbench (http://www.taverna.org.uk) and Fedora technology as the core repository environment.
You can write your own applications, but a cost-effective solution is to incorporate preservation tools such as Jhove or METS into the Taverna workflow. Taverna allows you to integrate these tools in the workflow, and supports repository integration (read from and distribute data back into preservation environments such as Fedora). The Taverna workflow (sandpit environment) can be run on the desktop, however for running long workflows you might want to run Taverna on the internet. More information about the SCAPE platform and how Hadoop, Taverna and Fedora are integrated is available at http://www.scape-project.eu/publication/1334/.
Setting up a preservation platform like this also entails a series of challenges. Some of the obstacles you might encounter are mismatches in the parallelisation (difference between desktop and cluster environment). Workflows that work for repositories might not work for web archiving, because they use different distributed environments. To avoid mismatches use a cluster that is centred on specific workflow needs. Keeping the cluster in-house is something of which institutions are wary, while on the other hand they may be reluctant about transferring big datasets over the internet.
Related links:
http://openplanetsfoundation.org/
http://wiki.opf-labs.org/display/SP/Home
http://www.myExperiment.org/
New acquisition: Further papers of Alexander Craig Aitken
The mathematician, statistician, writer, composer and musician, Alexander Craig Aitken, was born in Dunedin, New Zealand on 1 April 1895. He was of Scottish descent. He attended Otago Boys’ High School from 1908 to 1912. On winning a university scholarship in 1912 he went on to study at the University of Otago in 1913, enrolling in Mathematics, French and Latin. Studies were cut short by the 1914-1918 War however and he enlisted in 1915 serving with the Otago Infantry. Aitken saw action in Gallipoli and Egypt, and he was wounded during the Battle of the Somme. After his hospitalisation, he returned to New Zealand in 1917.
On the completion of his studies in 1920, Aitken became a school-teacher at Otago Boys’ High School and the same year he married Winifred Betts the first lecturer in Botany at the University of Otago where he also did some tutoring. Then, encouraged by a professor of mathematics at the University, he gained a postgraduate scholarship which brought him to Edinburgh University in 1923. His thesis on statistics gained him the degree of D.Sc. in 1925 when he also joined the University staff as a lecturer in Statistics and Mathematical Economics. In 1937 he was promoted to Reader, and in 1946 was appointed to the Chair of Mathematics.
Aitken’s publications include: jointly with H. W. Turnbull, The theory of canonical matrices (1932); with D. E. Rutherford, a series of Mathematical Texts; wartime experiences in Gallipoli to the Somme: Recollections of a New Zealand infantryman (1963); and, posthumously To catch the spirit. The memoir of A.C. Aitken with a biographical introduction by P.C. Fenton (1995). He made many important contributions to the many fields of his subject, particularly in the theory of Matrix Algebra and its application to various branches of mathematics. In his time, Professor Aitken was one of the fastest mathematical calculators in the world.
While at school, Aitken had learned to play the violin, and later on in life he played both the violin and viola and composed pieces for performance by university groups. He died in Edinburgh on 3 November 1967.
Shortly before Christmas we acquired a further tranche of Aitken’s papers. These include a number of original mathematical manuscripts, correspondence, legal documents, offprints, publications and photographs. Amongst these is a review by Aitken of Sara Turning’s “Alan Turing”.
At the moment we still have to look through the collection, box it up and create a basic handlist. Once this is done it will be available for consultation.
Association for Historical and Fine Art Photography Conference
The Digital Imaging Unit attended the “Association for Historical and Fine Art Photography” conference for the first time in November at the end of last year. The conference was hosted in Starr Auditorium at Tate Modern and was opened by Sir Nicholas Serota the Director of Tate. Marvelous venue aside it was an engaging conference. Serious joke of the morning went to the Preservation Advisory Centre Imaging Group who highlighted that often at the end of digitisation planning the final step is usually outlined as, ” Just put it online“. This really diminishes the enormity of that task. However it is interesting to see so many national institutions grappling with the same digital problems and discussing digitising for access verses digitising for preservation and issues like high value low volume workflow verses mass digitisation workflow.
Sarah Saunders of Electric Lane who has been involved with IPTC embedded metadata standards introduced ,The new SCREM (SChema for Rich Embedded Metadata for Heritage Media Files) project. Plans are afoot to cater for heritage imaging metadata within IPTC fields. Sarah also made a strong case for this in the example that when we download music files by right clicking and saving to our desktops we now expect at a minimum to see a title, author and probably a creation date. So why has this not happened for images? and can IPTC embedded metadata remedy that situation?
It was cool to find out from Maureen Pennock that the British Library not only backs their truly massive amount of data up, but stores that data backup in four geographically distant separate locations across the UK. Maureen also warned against the perils of BIT FLIP which degrades image quality in a variety of ways and the need to manage stored data for its preservation. Her view on cloud storage was an outright DON’T DO IT! which is a strong message from someone with her experience.
Dani Tagen’s talk was controversial as she described ” how we at the Horniman Museum & Gardens have managed to take 15,000 photos of about 8,000 objects in 10 months with one photographer and a small team of collection assistants.” she lost three kilos in weight teaching collections assistants how to take photographs. In my opinion the results were high volume poor quality by professional standards and the assistants themselves admitted that more training and time would be required to come up to professional standards. However the images were a marked improvement over previous efforts and were not for public consumption they were for internal use as documentary images of the collection. Dani was however playing to a tough audience. When viewing her own photographs alongside the assistants the quality of Dani’s work was far greater.
The highlight for me was English Heritage’s short film by Alan Bull covering the last hat mould makers in UK. The film described that the poisonous materials that hat mould makers worked with actually accounted for previous generations going insane hence the phrase “Mad As A Hatter”.
Conference abstracts can be found on the AFHAP website.
Malcolm Brown
New books at New College Library – January
New College Library has a regular display of new books at the far end of the Library Hall, close to the door to the stacks.
New in this month is Time and relative dimensions in faith : religion and Doctor Who, edited by Andrew Crome and James McGrath at PN1992.77.D6273 Tim. Also new is Neuroscience, psychology, and religion : illusions, delusions, and realities about human nature, by Malcolm A. Jeeves, at BL53 Jee.
These titles were purchased for Theology & Ethics at the School of Divinity, Edinburgh University.
You can see an regularly updated list of new books for New College Library on the Library Catalogue – choose the New Books Search and limit your search to New College Library. Here’s a quick link to new books arriving in the last few weeks. A word of caution – some of the books listed here may still be in transit between the Main Library (where they are catalogued) and New College Library, so not on the shelf just yet.
Hermann J Muller (1890-1967), American Geneticist: Radiation and Mutation Studies in the USA, USSR and Edinburgh
Continuing with the Soviet –Edinburgh genetics link, this week’s post focuses on the American geneticist and Nobel laureate, Hermann Joseph Muller (1890-1967) known for his work on the physiological and genetic effects of radiation. Born in New York City, he attended Columbia College for both his undergraduate and graduate degrees focussing on biology and the Drosophila genetics work of Thomas Hunt Morgan’s fly lab and was an early convert of the Mendelian-chromosome theory of heredity — and the concept of genetic mutations and natural selection as the basis for evolution. He formed a Biology Club and also became a proponent of eugenics; the connections between biology and society would be his perennial concern. Muller’s career first took him to the William Marsh Rice Institute, now Rice University in Houston in 1915, then back to Columbia College in 1918 where he continued teaching and expanding on his work on mutation rate and lethal mutations. In 1919, Muller made the important discovery of a mutant (later found to be a chromosomal inversion) that appeared to suppress crossing-over, which opened up new avenues in mutation rate studies. He was additionally interested in eugenics and investigated After Columbia, he went to the University of Texas and began to investigate radium and x-rays and the relationship between radiation and mutation. After a period of time Muller became disillusioned with the political situation in the United States and life in Texas and so, in 1932 he moved to Berlin, Germany to work with Nikolai Timofeev-Ressovsky, a Russian geneticist. Initially, his move was to be a limited sabbatical that turned into an eight-year five country stay. Later in 1932 Muller moved to the Soviet Union after being investigated by the FBI due to his involvement with the leftist (Communist) newspaper, The Spark, that he contributed to when in Texas. In Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) then Moscow, Muller worked at the Institute of Genetics where he imported the basic laboratory equipment and flies for a Drosophila lab.
At the Institute, Muller organized work on medical genetics and explored the relationship between genetics and radiation in more detail and completed his eugenics book, Out of the Night in which the main ideas dated to 1910. By 1936 Stalin and Lysenko were making it difficult for scientists and geneticists to work in the USSR (see previous post on the Lysenko Controversy) and Muller was forced to leave after Stalin read a translation of his eugenics book.
Muller moved to Edinburgh in September 1937 with c250 strains of Drosophila and began working for the University of Edinburgh. In 1939 the Seventh International Congress on Genetics was held in Edinburgh and Muller wrote a ‘Geneticists’ Manifesto’ in response to the question, “How could the world’s population be improved most effectively genetically?”
In 1940, he moved back to the United States to work with Otto Glaser at Amherst College and consulted on the Manhattan Project as well as a study of the mutational effects of radar. In 1945, owing to difficulties stemming from his Socialist leanings, he moved to Bloomington, Indiana to work in the Zoology Department at Indiana University. In 1946, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for the discovery that mutations can be induced by x-rays”.
In 1955 Muller was one of eleven prominent intellectuals to sign the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, the upshot of which was the first Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs in 1957, which addressed the control of nuclear weapons. He was a signatory (with many other scientists) of the 1958 petition to the United Nations, calling for an end to nuclear weapons testing, which was initiated by the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Linus Pauling.[3]
3 – John Bellamy Foster (2009). The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet, Monthly Review Press, New York, pp. 71-72.
Come work with us – Data Library Assistant post
Data Library Assistant
EDINA and Data Library, Information Services
£25,759- £29,837 per year
Full Time, Fixed Term: 36 months
Ref: 022330
The Data Library is working with others in Information Services to enhance and develop services to deliver the University’s Research Data Management programme. To this end the Data Library requires a member of the team to help us offer online and direct support for research data management planning and data curation, and to help raise awareness and provide training to staff and student researchers. 
The Data Library hosts Edinburgh DataShare, a research data repository for members of the University along with a data catalogue and a suite of research data support web pages within the University website. This is an excellent opportunity for a graduate to apply their research skills to a growing service area.
You will be a university graduate or have suitable relevant experience. You will be enthusiastic about new forms of scholarly communication such as open access publishing and open data, and working with open source software. You will be able to engage with peers in your discipline and help them to understand how good data management and sharing practices can improve their research and impact.
You will have research experience and data analysis skills as well as knowledge of publishing in an academic environment. You will have an understanding of university structures and norms.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills and up to date computer/Internet literacy is essential.
There are many advantages to working at the University. Benefits include flexible working, an excellent pension, career prospects and generous holiday provision.
Further details (please enter vacancy code 024399)
Closing Date: 29 January 2014
Contact Person: Ingrid Earp
Contact Number: +44 (0)131 651 1240
Contact Email: i.earp@ed.ac.uk
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