Welcome
2023 to 2024 was not without its challenges and uncertainties. However, I'm proud to say that once again we punched above our weight in making a positive impact on communities right across Scotland.
A major focus for us this year was on championing Scotland's languages. We continue our Scots Scriever writer's residency in partnership with Creative Scotland, and this year we appointed a true local legend in the promotion of the Scots language, Susi Briggs. Susi hit the ground running by hosting one of our flagship events of the year, the book launch for Len Pennie's 'poyums'. She has since carried out a tremendous programme of outreach and engagement activities throughout Dumfries and Galloway, where she is based.
We were also privileged to partner with the Gàidhlig community in our programming and events this year. The centrepiece was major exhibition 'Sgeul | Story: Folktales from the Scottish Highlands', which focused on the work and collections of a most interesting 19th century figure: comparative mythologist, polyglot and artist John Campbell of Islay. The exhibition highlighted Gaelic folktales that might have been lost if it weren't for his efforts to save these stories from extinction as the oral storytelling traditions dwindled.
The exhibition and its supplementary programme could not have been made possible without key partners including Sabhal Mòr Ostaig – with whom we recently signed a collaborative Memorandum of Understanding – and City of Edinburgh Council's Capital Gaelic initiative, which allowed us to work with pupils from Bun-sgoil Taobh na Pàirce. Thanks to Bòrd na Gàidhlig, we were also delighted to appoint the Library's inaugural Gàidhlig Storymaker, and this position was awarded to Kirsty MacDonald.
Our focus on Gàidhlig and folktales served as an inspiration to musicians. Last September we held a series of musical performances at our George IV Bridge building. This included a performance of composer Ned Bigham's take on the Ossianic Ballads by the Edinburgh Quartet and South Uist singer Màiri Macmillan. Renowned fiddler Aidan O'Rourke curated an evening of performances. What a joy it was to hear the reading rooms come to life through the evocative fiddle music from both Aidan and Sarah-Jane Summers.
This past year was a time for celebration for our digitisation and acquisitions teams as they exceeded targets. In 2015 we announced our intention to have a third of our holdings in digital format by 2025 and we have now surpassed that goal. It was a huge undertaking by colleagues throughout the Library to make this happen.
Some of my favourite pages in the annual review are about the acquisitions we made over the course of the year. Highlights include the first edition of 'The Broons' annual, which pleased many people when we announced it on Boxing Day. We also secured the archive of Damian Barr, whose play 'Maggie & Me' captivated audiences throughout Scotland this summer, and the complete archive of Agnes Owens, who was described as "the most unfairly neglected of all Scottish writers" by her contemporary, Alasdair Gray.
Gray's work was elevated to international acclaim once again over the past year with the release of Yorgos Lanthimos's critically acclaimed 'Poor Things', based on Gray's novel. As the home of the Alasdair Gray archive, we hold not only all drafts of the novel, but also early drafts of a film script written by Gray, as well as stunning illustrations by Alasdair himself. Gray's archive is one of those being itemised and catalogued thanks to the funds raised by last year's annual appeal, alongside those of George Mackay Brown, James Kelman, Agnes Owens and more. You can read detail of some of the treasures we have found so far inside.
I've barely skimmed the surface of our achievements this year, so you'll have to delve through these pages to find more. As ever, there's no way we could have achieved all of the above without the support of our partners, and especially our donors and supporters, and anyone who donated to our annual appeal. Every penny counts, and it helps us to deliver even more for the people of Scotland.
Finally, we turn 100 next year, so keep your eyes peeled for opportunities to engage with our special programme of events and activities throughout our centenary year. We can't wait to share it with you.
Amina Shah
National Librarian and Chief Executive
Safeguarding Collections
Acquisitions
'The Broons', Dundee, 1939
We acquired the very first 'The Broons' annual after at least a decade of searching for this elusive book. A copy finally showed up on a bookseller's website in the autumn of 2023.
"Scotland's happy family that makes every family happy" has been a Christmas favourite in households since they were launched more than eight decades ago, back in 1939.
Our copy of the first annual is the only one in a Scottish public collection and it is believed to be one of only 14 copies to have survived.
We also have the first copies of the 'Oor Wullie', 'The Dandy' and 'The Beano' annuals, all also published by Dundee's DC Thomson.
With thanks to the Magnus and Janet Soutar Trust for the donation which made this acquisition possible.
Scottish album of watercolours of the life and work of Robert Burns, 1914
This volume of 35 artworks features scenes including Alloway's haunted Kirk, which inspired Burns (1759 to 1796) to compose 'Tam o 'Shanter', and the Brigs of Ayr, which the Bard used for his poem of the same name describing an argument between the two bridges.
The album is closely connected to the Glenriddell manuscripts, the single biggest collection of Burns' manuscripts and among our most significant collections.
The Glenriddell manuscripts were a gift to the people of Scotland from American industrialist John Gribbel. As a thank you, this album of Burns watercolours by Scottish artists was commissioned and presented to him. The Gribbel family has now donated the album to the Library.
We are delighted to add this album to our collections ahead of our centenary year, especially as the Glenriddell manuscripts came to us when we were established in 1925.
Indenture for the Camden Estate, Trinidad, 1807 to 1819
This parchment details Scottish involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and describes the ownership rights of the plantation and the enslaved workers.
The indenture facilitated the transfer of ownership of the estate and enslaved workers to John Stewart and Alexander Fraser in the early 19th century.
Lists of enslaved workers include their names, ages, sex, stature, ethnicity, family relations on the plantation and the work they carried out. Many of them have been given Scottish names.
There are also lists of "runaways", which serve as an important source for recovering silenced voices.
We are grateful to both the Soutar Trust and Friends of the National Libraries, who provided funds that assisted with this acquisition.
Taste ephemera
Taste was a club night that ran every Sunday in Edinburgh from the mid-90s and proudly promoted a policy of inclusivity, with a large number of patrons from the LGBT community.
Established by Bob Orr (co-founder of Scotland's first gay bookshop, Lavender Menace), Taste featured DJs Fisher and Price playing house music and attracted a faithful following to venues across the city.
We received a donation of ephemera that relates to Taste and a number of club nights in Edinburgh and elsewhere in Scotland. This is a valuable addition to our collection of 1990s nightclub ephemera, especially dance culture.
Dulac copy of 'Treasure Island', 1927
Robert Louis Stevenson's 'Treasure Island' is one of the most-read works in Scottish literature and the pirate tale is one of the author's most translated and published novels.
While we have many editions of the book in our collections, we had been missing this limited edition version illustrated by Edmund Dulac (1882 to 1953), which is an an exquisite rendering of the story bound in vellum and with handmade paper.
Signed by Dulac, this copy is numbered 49 of 50 and is the only copy in a public institution in the UK other than the British Library.
Robert Louis Stevenson diary fragment, 1872
This rare, four-page manuscript covers the period between 9 May and 5 July 1872, when Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 to 1894) was 21 and living in Edinburgh, while studying law.
The extract features mention of "good friend of mine" Ms Fairfoul, details a day spent by the writer with his father and describes his inebriated state after a dinner with a colleague. The excerpt offers humorous insight into Stevenson's life as a young man and it is rare that Stevenson manuscripts of more than one page become available.
Thank you to the Soutar Trust for generously supporting the purchase of the diary fragment.
Poems and broadsides by William McGonagall
The Scottish poet of Irish descent is widely regarded as one of the worst English-language poets ever but he was certainly prolific when it came to his verse.
Scorned during his life and often classed as "so bad it's good", his work represents many things, not least resilience to criticism. Our collection of his work in his unique style and voice continues to intrigue, entertain and stand out.
We acquired two broadsides published by McGonagall (1825–1902) and these are uncommon, especially those printed in Dundee in the 1880s.
The first tells of the death of Alexander Heriot Mackonochie SSC (1825–1887), a Church of England mission priest of Scots ancestry whose body was found in a forest near Ballachulish after he got lost while out walking.
The second broadside concerns a battle fought in October 1897 (not November, as the poet claims) in the Tirah Campaign, resulting in the award of four Victoria Crosses.
We also acquired a sheet featuring two works by McGonagall, 'Ode to the King' and 'Bonnie Montrose'. The latter includes the line: "The Mid Links it is most charming to be seen, And I'm sure it is a very nice bowling green."
John Wood's 'Town atlas of Northumberland and Durham', 1820 to 1827
Edinburgh-based mapmaker John Wood (about 1789 to 1847) created the first detailed plans for many British towns in the early 1800s.
The 'Town atlas of Northumberland and Durham' is unusual, with original, individual maps gathered by collector Frank Graham and reproduced in a limited-edition facsimile atlas in 1991.
The detailed, clearly drawn plans capture many towns just before the arrival of railways changed their shape and demography.
Each sheet is a very large, folded folio with minor outline hand colour on many. Published in small runs and only made available locally, the maps are scarce.
We are grateful to the R.W. Clark Fund and the T.A. Fund for funding this acquisition.
Sporting archives, programmes and papers
The papers of speedway reporter John 'Jock' Watt have been added to our collections and include interviews with stars of the sport, programmes for events, correspondence and photographs from his reporting days in the mid-20th century.
The papers are among a number of items relating to sporting heritage that we have acquired over the past year.
The archive of mountaineer and mountain rescue team leader John Hinde (1927 to 2002) has been donated by his daughter, including diaries, scrapbooks and photo albums. The diaries cover his entire career, from 1941 until 2002.
The archive of Edinburgh Borderers Rugby Football Club has also been acquired. The club was active from 1921 until 2021 and its papers include minute books, scrapbooks, photos and accounts which show both the history of the club and the social side of membership.
A small volume relating to cricket in the 1830s – early for the sport in Scotland – is now part of our collections. This once belonged to a George Quentin of Glasgow and while one half contains cricket scores, largely featuring Lanarkshire, the other half, curiously, has recipes for food and drink.
The Grange in Edinburgh, founded in 1832 and one of Scotland's oldest and most successful cricket clubs, generously donated items held with us on deposit since 1995, including photographs.
We also acquired the programme for the second leg of the European Cup semi-final between Celtic and Dukla Praha on 12 April 1964. This game preceded one of the greatest achievements in Scottish sporting history – Celtic beating Inter Milan 2-1 in the European Cup final in Lisbon in 1967, making them the first British team to win the Cup.
Another important addition to our sporting collections is the 1875 'Scottish Football Annual', produced by the Scottish Football Association, which was founded only two years previously. The title page bears the signature "Dav Davidson Junr. 1875", which may be the David Davidson who played for Queen's Park and earned five caps for Scotland between 1878 and 1881.
Benny Lynch programmes
We welcomed 17 superb and rare programmes relating to the career of Glaswegian flyweight boxer Benny Lynch (1913 to 1946), covering the period from 1933 to 1938.
The programmes include a championship final at Glasgow's Kelvin Hall on 21 March 1934, plus major venues such as Wembley. We also acquired ticket stubs, postcards – many of them bearing Lynch's autograph – and other ephemera relating to his career.
Lynch, regarded as one of Glasgow's greatest sporting heroes, enjoyed a meteoric rise to fame from his humble beginnings in the city's deprived Gorbals area, becoming the first Scotsman to win a world boxing title.
His legacy was tarnished by convictions for domestic violence and assault, with his behaviour fuelled by the alcoholism that played a part in his poor health and early death.
Equality Network publications
These documents feature topics relating to the lives and rights of the LGBT community.
The publications came to us via legal deposit from the Equality Network, which deposited both print and digital items. Collections such as these help us to better reflect society today and can support co-curated work with audiences in the future.
As a legal deposit library, we are legally entitled to collect a copy of everything published in the UK. This acquisition came in as part of the Library's EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion) Collecting Project.
'Ivanhoe' in Japanese, 1886
This is the earliest example in our collections of a translation of Sir Walter Scott (1771 to 1832) into an East-Asian language.
The translator, Ushiyama Kakudō, also known as Ushiyama Ryōsuke, was an early Meiji period novelist. At that time, amid political changes in their country, Japanese authors interested in politics were inspired by foreign novelists. Ushiyama also translated Benjamin Disraeli's novel 'Henrietta Temple' (1837).
UK web archive arrives in Edinburgh
The UK web archive consists of millions of archived websites harvested since 2004. The collection captures the diversity and extent of the social, creative and intellectual output of the modern era.
All six legal deposit libraries in the UK and Ireland contribute to selecting and managing archived content, which complements an annual domain crawl that harvests millions of websites.
The web archive is hosted by the British Library, with two copies maintained and replicated for preservation purposes.
It was agreed in 2022 that a more robust preservation approach was required and we offered to host a copy of the web archive in Edinburgh.
This significant undertaking involved transferring the entire contents of the archive – billions of files and more than one petabyte of data – to five web archive servers which we bought for this purpose, with replication taking many months.
Once replication was complete the hardware was transported to Edinburgh and arrived in July 2023.
Photo By James Chapelard, courtesy National Theatre Of Scotland
Archives of Agnes Owens, Hew Lorimer and Damian Barr
We were thrilled to complete the purchase of the literary archive of Agnes Owens (1926 to 2014), who was described by her contemporary Alasdair Gray as "the most unfairly neglected of all living Scottish authors".
The manuscripts complement holdings placed with us by Owens during her lifetime. The archive includes manuscripts to short stories and novellas such as 'A Working Mother' and 'Like Birds in the Wilderness' – texts now deemed as central in the canon of modern Scottish literature.
We have also become the home of the archive of architectural sculptor Hew Lorimer (1907 to 1993), who designed the seven allegorical figures on the façade of our building on George IV Bridge in Edinburgh.
The papers include personal correspondence between Lorimer and his textile designer wife, Mary Wylie Lorimer, photos, sketchbooks and drawings. There are also documents outlining Lorimer's role in civic conservation societies and projects during the 1950s and 1960s.
We are grateful to the Lorimer family and Lorimer Society (incorporating the Hew Lorimer Trust) for generously transferring the Lorimer Archive to the Library as a donation.
We have also acquired the archive of journalist, writer and broadcaster Damian Barr (born 1976), who is one of Scotland's most celebrated contemporary authors. His award-winning memoir, 'Maggie & Me', follows Barr growing up gay in Thatcher's Lanarkshire. A play based on his book was staged by the National Theatre of Scotland in 2024. Barr spoke to our 'Discover' magazine about the play and his next project.
Conservation and digitisation
John Murray Archive cataloguing
The house of John Murray published some of the most important and popular works in British literature, from poetry and novels to scientific, religious and political works, travel books, biographies, periodicals and educational titles.
The publisher's authors have included Sir Walter Scott, James Hogg, David Livingstone, Jane Austen and Charles Darwin.
Our John Murray Archive offers fascinating insight into both the creation of seminal works and the history of the publishing house – founded in 1768 by Scotsman John McMurray – making it one of our most comprehensive and valuable literary collections.
We began a six-month scoping project to review the collection's cataloguing and conservation status in April 2023. This exercise resulted in the data we needed to support a funding application for a multi-year programme of work and identified important themes and interesting individuals from the papers, helping reveal more untold stories.
A generous grant from the John R. Murray Charitable Trust will allow us to take forward the scoping project's recommendations in 2024.
Papers of John Hinde
The daughter of mountaineer and mountain rescue team leader John Hinde kindly donated both his papers and funds to enable these items to be rehoused and listed, meaning people can now access the files through our catalogue.
Hinde (1927 to 2002) began climbing at the age of 11 and joined the RAF at 15 as a boy entrant. He later became leader of RAF mountain rescue teams, including spells at Leuchars and Kinloss. He also spent 20 years with Outward Bound at Loch Eil, teaching rock and ice climbing, sailing and canoeing.
His archive includes diaries, photo albums and scrapbooks and his papers can be consulted in our Special Collections Reading Room.
Cyber security – working with the British Library
In October 2023, the British Library suffered a significant ransomware cyberattack that compromised most of its online systems.
As we are a legal deposit partner, this had ramifications on access to some digital material for our own members.
Our IT team was quick to respond, isolating systems to ensure our own services were not affected. Since the cyberattack, we have been working in close partnership with British Library colleagues to support their 'Rebuild & Renew' programme, including a project to restore on-site access to non-print legal deposit materials such as the UK Web Archive.
We have used the lessons from the cyberattack passed on from the British Library to improve our cyber security processes and protection.
The year in numbers
- 7,195,271 additions to our collections
- 68,091 hidden collections catalogued
- 51,337 items from our collections digitized (of which 26,495 were done by GoogleBooks)
- 4,913 newspapers digitised
- 123,244 people attended our exhibitions and events
This year's intake:
- Total intake: 1,210,688
- Serial issues: 43,001
- eJournal articles: 969,573
- Newspapers: 14,427
- eBooks: 64,175
- Maps: 625
- Books: 45,267
- Other: 73,600
Annual Appeal update
We were thrilled by the positive response to our Annual Appeal, which was launched to raise funds to catalogue and curate the archives of Scotland's modern writers.
This work has focused on three literary archives – those of Alasdair Gray (1934 to 2019), Booker Prize winner James Kelman (1946–) and George Mackay Brown (1921 to 1996). Almost all of Gray's archive is now held at the Library.
We have uncovered a number of 'discoveries' during our work with these archives, including:
Gray's 'Dante ledgers': Sketchbooks and ledger books used by Gray to draft his 'Divine Trilogy', his translation of Dante's classic narrative poem. The ledgers are also full of doodles, illustrations, drafts of letters and journal entries, which reflect on politics, art and Gray's health.
Scripts and correspondence relating to proposed film adaptations of Gray's 'Poor Things', plus material relating to Yorgos Lanthimos's Oscar-winning 2023 film adaptation.
Correspondence to Mackay Brown from friends, fans, fellow writers, publishers, agents, artists and composers. The huge collection spans four decades and offers insight into his life and writing habits as well as highlighting the high regard in which he was held by readers and peers.
Mackay Brown's diaries from 1958 to 1996, revealing his inner struggles and anxieties around social commitments. The diary for 1968 describes the writer's only overseas trip, to Ireland, and he describes meeting Seamus Heaney and Brendan Kennelly.
Typescripts and proofs of Mackay Brown's 'Loaves and Fishes' (1959), the collection that earned him critical acclaim.
Manuscripts for Kelman's 'Dirt Road' (2016), 'That Was a Shiver' (2017) and 'God's Teeth and Other Phenomena' (2022), plus his correspondence with literary figures including Liz Lochhead, Tom Leonard, Alasdair Gray and Janice Galloway.
Gift to the nation
Four important letters by philosopher David Hume (1711 to 1776) have been acquired for the national collections thanks to the generosity of one of our frequent visitors, who left a gift to the Library in his will.
We have the most significant collection of Hume manuscripts in the world and we are the premier destination for those studying his life and work.
That is why the late Professor Sandy Stewart, a leading historian of 18th and 19th century philosophy and a Hume specialist, chose to remember us in his will.
His gift made possible the acquisition of the Hume letters (one of which is pictured right) along with contributions from the Soutar Trust and Friends of the National Libraries.
Professor Stewart's friend and colleague, Ruth Barlow, said: "He would have been pleased as punch that the Library has been able to purchase more Hume materials with his bequest.
"Library staff have been wonderfully kind and understanding throughout the process and it has truly helped me to see my friend's memory immortalised in this way within an institution he loved."
To learn more about leaving a legacy to us in your will, contact Lucy Clement on development@nls.uk or visit www.nls.uk/support-nls.