Welcome
Dr John Scally, National Librarian
The month of March 2020 will surely go down as one of the most difficult in the Library's history. In fact, it is tempting to let it eclipse the 11 months that went before.
Yet right up to that momentous series of events, the Library was having a most dynamic and productive year! And this Annual Review reminds us of our many successes before the lockdown hit.
It's the final year of our current five-year strategy — 'The Way Forward, 2015-20'. In 2015, we set out to invest in our infrastructure to ensure we can better preserve the national collections. We also set ourselves the target of making one third of our collections available in digital format by 2025, and we are on track to achieve this.
Our strategy for the next five years is nearly ready. It will build upon the hard work we have done and enable the launch of our most ambitious audience development plans yet. We know we have something for everyone, but we know many people in Scotland don't necessarily know about us. That is set to change.
Looking back over the year, one of the activities I'm most proud of is our ongoing programme helping young people, and those in early careers, on their way to professional employment. Opening the Library up through internships, work experience and volunteering programmes has given us all a genuine thrill during the year – and helped the participants move on to secure employment. You'll find some inspiring personal stories inside these pages.
We were fortunate to receive some major donations to the collections. The year began with the generous donation made by Ian Rankin — we are now home to his entire literary archive which is well on the way to being catalogued.
We also received the final tranche of some 10,000 Scottish sound recordings from music enthusiast William Dean-Myatt. A record collector based in the West Midlands, Mr Dean-Myatt amassed his collection over a 70-year period.
We made a quantum leap in digital engagement this year. It began with a major multimedia 1980s retrospective, 'Back to the future: 1979–1989', which ran from May to November. A bespoke website of essays by staff and guest writers, and films from our Moving Image Archive, took people back to the days of denim, protest, synth pop, revolution in Europe and emerging technologies.
The 80s retrospective occurred in tandem with our major exhibition looking back some 250 years to Scotland's intellectual golden era — the Enlightenment. Timed to coincide with a major symposium held in Edinburgh, 'Northern Lights' gave many thousands of visitors an insight into the hotbed of genius that Scotland had become — a place of enlightened discussion and debate.
We all know what happened at the start of 2020. Which meant that, for the first time in our history, we had to close our doors to our readers and visitors, and maintain communications with them virtually. As a huge swathe of the collections are digitised, or came to us originally in digital format, this placed us in good stead to continue to assist people with academic research, personal learning journeys, family history research, or simply something to keep families educated and entertained during lockdown.
As we slowly resume our services at our buildings, we will continue to develop our online presence. Lockdown has changed all of us in ways big and small, and we will take the best of what we have done to come back stronger and more relevant than ever.
Safeguarding collections
Acquisitions
Alasdair Gray
Scotland lost a literary and cultural giant towards the end of 2019 with the passing of Alasdair Gray, which was marked by tributes from around the globe. Labelled a genius and a polymath by others, his 2005 description of himself as 'a fat, spectacled, balding, increasingly old Glasgow pedestrian' displays his humorous side, if not his unique creative abilities.
His archive at the Library comprises literary and personal papers, artwork, photographs, slides, transparencies, and audio-visual material. Alasdair Gray took it upon himself to arrange some of the inventories and describe some of the collections. The archive measures around 12 linear metres, excluding the many huge files and boxes containing artwork and other large items. It is one of our larger modern literary archives, perhaps only dwarfed by that of Muriel Spark.
Last year, Gray continued to add to his impressive body of work, and we added more to his archive at the Library. New acquisitions include 'To a critic who calls do not go gentle into that goodnight a silly poem' — a striking signed poetry print published in 2019 — and 'Bella Caledonia', one of a signed edition of 60 prints.
Our acquisition of Alasdair Gray's papers began in 1984, when the then-curator of modern Scottish literary papers wrote to the author noting 'it would give us much pleasure if your work could be represented in the national collection'. That pleasure will remain, but with sadness at the passing of one of the most important figures in modern literature and culture.
Music enthusiast donates entire record collection
In September 2019, we received the final tranche of a collection of more than 10,000 sound recordings from music enthusiast, William Dean-Myatt.
A record collector based in the West Midlands, Mr Dean-Myatt amassed his collection over a 70-year period. From an initial interest in jazz, his special interest in 78s of Scottish music stemmed from the music played by his relatives in Scotland. His research resulted in his book, 'The Scottish Vernacular Discography 1888-1960'.
Mr Dean-Myatt said:
'I have always been bemused as to why Scotland did not have a sound archive that recorded the commercial vernacular music of Scotland, rather than high art music.
I want the collection to be heard and used by people in Scotland to listen and learn about historic Scottish music. By donating my collection to the National Library of Scotland, I am hoping it will be the foundation for something bigger and better.'
The final instalment of the donation was approximately 7,500 shellac discs, adding to the 3,000 sound recordings already at the Library – mostly made up of shellac records, but also including vinyl, cassette tapes and a small number of wax cylinders.
The majority of the shellac records are mass-produced commercial copies, but the collection also includes a number of rare and unique items. It includes Scottish music of various genres: Gaelic songs, recordings of the Scottish music hall, Border songs, fiddle and bagpipe music and dialect sketches. Artists represented in the collection include Jimmy Shand, James Scott Skinner, Harry Gordon, Harry Lauder, Bob Smith, Tony Capaldi, Willie Kemp, Peter Wyper and Heloise Russell-Ferguson.
First ever appearance of Desperate Dan added to national collections
We have filled a crucial gap in our collection of 'The Dandy' weekly comics following the acquisition of the first-ever copy.
'The Dandy Comic' was first published on 4 December 1937, costing two pennies for 28 pages. It was an instant success, selling more than 480,000 copies.
In many ways, it was the first modern British comic, and should be of great interest to anyone researching popular literature. Today, it is estimated there are only around 20 copies of the first edition known to be in existence. Which makes this copy one of the rarest items in our collections.
The Thomson-Adam Smith archive
A major addition to our manuscript collections on the history of science and ideas in modern Britain, the papers of Sir George Paget Thomson and Kathleen Thomson (née Smith) and their family illuminate almost a century of academic research and intellectual family life in Aberdeen, Cambridge and London.
Comprising correspondence, diaries, household papers, juvenilia and photographs, this generous gift sets the achievements of Sir George and his father, Sir JJ Thomson — both Nobel laureates who made landmark discoveries in the history of modern physics — in the context of the work and private lives of their Scottish relations.
This acquisition builds on the extensive family archive established at the Library by Lady Thomson's sister, the BBC editor, author, and mountaineer Janet Adam Smith (1905-1999).
Vintage home shopping catalogues
Home shopping catalogues are not something that we usually receive through legal deposit — the mechanism in which we have the right to claim a copy of everything published in the UK and Ireland — and we therefore only had one in our collection, from 1989.
During our retrospective on the 1980s, Back to the future (see Inspiring Engagement), we realised how important and useful these publications are as a window into our recent past. As well as serving as a price index for consumer products, they are also an inventory of the fashions and designs of everyday products, from polyester tracksuits to indoor foot spas. We recently bought seven home shopping catalogues in excellent condition that span the years 1979 to 1989.
Ian Rankin donates literary archive
The UK's biggest-selling crime novelist, Ian Rankin, donated his literary archive to the Library. Often cited as the 'the king of tartan noir', Ian Rankin's work has resonated with millions throughout the world — with his novels translated into 36 languages.
Totalling around 50 boxes of material, which in shelving terms is more than 21 feet, the archive includes typescripts of manuscripts with handwritten annotations and notes by the author. Also included is correspondence with literary figures such as Iain Banks, Ruth Rendell, Val McDermid and Jilly Cooper, as well as figures from across the political and cultural spectrum. Not surprisingly, police officers feature regularly in correspondence.
Described by Rankin as 'a pretty complete author's life, late-20th century-style', the archive material dates from 1972–2018.
Ian Rankin added:
'I remember that in my first week as a postgraduate student we were given a tour of the National Library of Scotland, including access to the basement levels. Those vaulted underground corridors would reappear in the climactic scenes of my first Rebus novel. The Library has seemed like a friend ever since, so it seems fitting — as well as a thrill and an honour — that my archive should find a permanent home there.'
Thanks to a generous financial donation by Mr Rankin, we recruited a curator to catalogue and promote the archive. Further announcements will be made when the archive is fully catalogued and available for consultation at our reading rooms.
Conservation and digitisation
Library triumphs at facilities management awards
We work hard to ensure all aspects of the national collections are preserved and made available for current and future generations. Thus, we were delighted to take home two awards at the UK National Premises and Facilities Management Awards 2019. We scooped the 'Partnership in Smart Facilities Management' award (with Craigalan Controls) which also won the overall winners award. Pictured are Ian Symonds, Head of Estates and Julie Bon, Head of Collections Care.
Collection Development Policy
We updated our Collection Development Policy this year. We maintain our traditional and mandated areas of collecting: Scottish publications and archival materials, UK publications, British Commonwealth, United States and overseas English-language publications. We also collect in Gaelic and Scots languages.
The new policy recognises the need to increase and improve collecting of, for, and in collaboration with, underrepresented groups. We will address coverage in our collecting and collections, of people of colour and LGBTQ+. We will improve the accessibility of our collections with regard to equalities and diversity.
We collect in collaboration with other institutions at local, national and international levels. Material is acquired primarily by purchase, donation and legal deposit (our legal right to request a copy of everything published in the UK and Ireland). The Scottish Government Collection Purchase Fund is vital in our ability to collect, as is the generosity of donors and the shared UK legal deposit infrastructure.
Venice & Lombardy by James Craig Annan
This book arose from a trip Scottish photographer James Craig Annan (1864–1946) made to northern Italy in 1894. The photographs he took during this trip are regarded as some of his finest. They show his mastery of using a hand-held camera to capture fleeting moments (what Cartier Bresson would later define as the 'decisive moment'). Annan's approach was to select first the general composition and then to 'wait until the figures unconsciously group and pose themselves'. The resulting photogravures in this book are classics of the pictorialist tradition of late 19th-century and early 20th-century photography.
This copy of the book is no. 5 of 75 copies, although it is highly likely that far fewer copies in book form were actually produced. The book is in its original quarter leather binding of reverse-calf with drab cloth boards, and was a gift by Annan to the Glasgow Art Club. 'Venice & Lombardy: a series of photogravures' is a very welcome addition to the Library's strong holdings of photographically illustrated books by Scottish photographers. It was acquired with the assistance of Art Fund and Friends of the National Libraries.
Library achieves archive accreditation
The Library has achieved the Archive Service Accreditation — the UK standard for archive services, and a very important industry standard to meet in the archives world. Following a rigorous analysis of our processes, digital provision and public engagement, we were awarded accreditation.
The panel of assessors congratulated us on our clear strategic approach, and for focusing our efforts on building audiences for the 'exceptionally significant archive collections' after the investment in recent years in systems and procedures.
We were also commended for having an open, outward-looking approach, particularly through the Kelvin Hall development which transformed access to our moving image and sound collections, and increased outreach activities across Scotland.
Digital preservation and storage
We hold millions of unique 'born-digital' items in our collections, and we have invested heavily in the infrastructure that has allowed us to digitise vast swathes of the physical collections for all to view and reuse online. Here, we'll highlight two major projects that will help us safeguard and preserve these digital treasures.
First, we moved all digital preservation data — 40 million files requiring 450TB of storage space — to a new form of storage built on Amazon S3 cloud technology, stored locally at Edinburgh and Glasgow. As we add data to one site, it's automatically copied to the other. This protects the data against hardware failures, damage to the storage rooms, and ransomware as the data cannot be deleted or changed.
Second, we have begun to automatically store a third copy of our preservation data in a low-cost cloud service called Amazon Deep Archive. This stores a final copy in another area of the UK and further reduces the risks to our digital collections by using a different technology, vendor and security system. This project is set to be completed later in 2020.
Improving access
Intake and cataloguing
The total number of items received over the course of the year was just under 1.6 million items. Legal Deposit content — both print and digital — continues to constitute most of our intake, amounting to more than 95 per cent of collections acquired by the Library this year. This is complemented by material purchased by or donated to the Library.
To provide access to these materials, more than 135,000 records were created by our cataloguers. As well as that, more than 1.4 million records were imported to provide access to Non-Print Legal Deposit content (material that comes to us in electronic format). More than 2.1 million global changes and 33,000 manual changes were made to records to improve discovery and access.
Hidden Collections
We continue to make progress with the Library's Hidden Collections Programme, which will provide access to more than 1.4 million uncatalogued items from the Library's legacy collection by 2025. This year, 167,714 items were catalogued, making almost 23 per cent of the hidden collections now publicly available.
Highlights from the year include; completion of phase three of the Manuscript Retrospective Cataloguing Project, cataloguing work for the Mediaeval Manuscripts Project, global import of more than 100,000 records from the House of Commons Parliamentary Papers collection, completion of the Ruari McLean Collection — a fascinating and eclectic collection of material representing typography and design, and the Grampian Television News Tape collection, consisting of 11,089 individual television news stories.
Scottish Ballet videos preserved
Scottish Ballet holds a fond place in the nation's cultural life and is one of the world's leading ballet companies. Founded by Peter Darrell and Elizabeth West as the Western Theatre Ballet in Bristol in 1957, it subsequently moved to Glasgow in 1969 and was renamed Scottish Theatre Ballet, changing to Scottish Ballet in 1974.
In its lifetime, Scottish Ballet has amassed a large video archive. As its 50th anniversary approached in 2019, thoughts turned to preserving this precious history. The archive not only contains unique performances from the first 30 years of their history, but glimpses 'behind the scenes' at rehearsals and community events.
Scottish Ballet approached our Moving Image Archive for our expertise in preserving this important record and making it available to as wide an audience as possible. With the help of
donors including the William Grant Foundation and the Foyle Foundation, we embarked on a digitisation project to preserve the video footage — much of which was in a very fragile state and at risk of deterioration — for posterity.
For us, it was also an opportunity to fill a gap in the national collections — we have no other ballet footage from years past.
Working in partnership, we hired staff including a video preservation technician and a cataloguer. We bought equipment, including three high-specification computers and tape playback machines. We prioritised tapes for digitisation from an initial visual appraisal using the information on the labels or in the tape boxes, and drawing on the knowledge of colleagues at Scottish Ballet.
The project has resulted in the preservation of more than 200 Scottish Ballet performances. It offers a unique record of the development of classical and contemporary ballet in Scotland and the development and history of the national ballet company.
Visitors to the National Library of Scotland at Kelvin Hall can now browse almost 50 years of ballet. Clips from each tape are also being selected and digitised to offer a 'taster' of the collection to online visitors who may not be able to visit the Library.
Photography appeal
We are grateful to the many donors that contributed to our 2019 Annual Appeal, which sought funds to conserve the Library's most fragile photographs.
A recent survey of our holdings revealed photographic collections that capture periods of rapid societal change alongside timeless family portraits, as well as dramatic, unfamiliar scenery alongside Scotland's traditional industries. But the survey also highlighted the extent and range of degradation, and urgent conservation work was required to save them.
Among the collections are three folders of photographs gathered by Sir Patrick Geddes to demonstrate his method of city survey in the 1910 Cities and Town Planning Exhibition. They contain a number of calotype prints thought to be by David Octavian Hill. These will be the first candidates for treatment by an expert photographic conservator who we can now appoint with the funds raised.
The conservator will remove surface dirt and treat mould, flatten and support any damaged corners, and house the material in a suitable way so that it can be accessed and treasured for years to come.
Stevenson maps and plans of Scotland, 1660–1940
At least 2000 plans relating to historical engineering in Scotland from the Stevenson archive can now be searched online using our new map-based viewer.
The Stevenson archive contains material from the firm established by Robert Stevenson, celebrated lighthouse engineer and grandfather of Robert Louis Stevenson, in the early 19th century.
Stevenson and his descendants worked on projects all over Scotland, ranging from designing harbours and lighthouses to surveying routes for new railways to remodelling the streets of Edinburgh.
Records for Stevenson plans of Scottish places can now be viewed, sorted and filtered using a dynamic map interface. The site can also be searched by keyword, or people can browse a full list of the places, subjects and people featured on the site.
The online resource was created during a placement by Rachel Dishington, an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership PhD student at the University of Edinburgh.
Latest digitised collections
With our mass digitisation studio going at full speed, we digitised 46,384 items from our collections this year (on a typical day we generate more than 7,000 images). Highlights include 3,5000 Scottish Exam Papers dated 1964–2006, and around 700 publications by the non-political organs of the League of Nations that dealt with heath, disarmament, economic and financial matters for the duration of the League (1919–1945). Our project to digitise all maps of Scotland from the collections by the end of 2020 is well under way, with almost 20,000 of them digitised this year.
We also digitised 16 books by Lewis Grassic Gibbon (1901–1935), who is regarded as the most important Scottish prose writer of the early 20th century. All were published in the last seven years of his life, mostly under his real name, James Leslie Mitchell. They include two works of science fiction, non-fiction works on exploration, short stories set in Egypt, a novel about Spartacus, and the classic 'A Scots Quair' trilogy which includes 'Sunset Song'. Mitchell's first book is also included, 'Hanno: or The Future of Exploration' (1928), a rare work that has never been republished.
More than 2,700 antiquarian Scottish books were also digitised, to add to a larger collection of 17,000 books. The first 4,000 from the collection are now online, coving subjects such as sport, education, diseases, adventure, occupations, the Jacobites, politics and religion. Among the 29 languages represented are English, Gaelic, Italian, French, Russian and Swedish.
Thanks to generous funding from Alexander Graham, we have made progress on our project to digitise all the mediaeval manuscripts from our founding collection (the Advocates' collection), dating from the late 10th to 16th centuries. We have completed the conservation work and cataloguing of these materials, and have digitised around 100 of them, including mediaeval chartularies and some of the key manuscripts of Older Scots literature (e.g. our two manuscripts of Andrew Wyntoun's 'Orygynale Cronikyl', Stewart of Baldynneis's 'Roland Furious', and John Bellenden's translation of 'Livy'). We hope to make these images available on our website in 2021, with access to full descriptions.
The Unlocking Our Sound Heritage project team continue to meet annual targets with just under 2,500 sound recordings digitised this year. Around 1,200 recordings were fully catalogued, 3,705 catalogued to product level and 1,644 to recording level. Following the major acquisition of the Dean-Myatt collection, 568 of the shellac discs have also been digitised.
We exceeded our moving image target within the Hidden Collections project with 2,624 records made publicly available. All preservation goals were met, including the processing of all nitrate film collections, and we established plans to improve preservation of vinegar or fungus-affected film, and magnetic video. For the first time digitised moving image was ingested into our digital preservation storage system and donations of born-digital moving image were accepted using the media shuttle system. A digital restoration project recreated the colour tints in the digitised version of 'To Rona on a Whaler'. A further 95 videos and 353 films were digitised either as result of requests (individuals or production companies), or for use in our events and exhibitions.
Promoting research
Research networks
Research networks are intended to support forums for the discussion and exchange of ideas on a specified thematic area, issue or problem. Library staff are often involved in research networks relating to our collections and we often host workshops and other events as part of the network programme. Networks are funded by research councils and learned societies such as the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) and Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).
Currently, we are involved in the following research networks:
- Claimed from Stationers' Hall network, led by the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and funded by AHRC
- Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century, led by the University of Glasgow and funded by the AHRC
- Works of Allan Ramsay, led by the University of Glasgow and funded by AHRC
- The 1820s: Innovation and Diffusion, led by University of Glasgow and University of York and funded by the RSE
- Mapping the Oceans, led by University of Erfurt and funded by Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (German Federal Ministry of Education and Research)
- Scottish Community Heritage, led by University of St Andrews and funded by the RSE
- Memorialising Mary Queen of Scots, led by University of Glasgow and funded by AHRC
- Walter Scott's Chapbook Collection, led by the University of Aberdeen and funded by the RSE
- Ending Period Poverty, led by University of St Andrews and funded by the RSE
Centre for History of the Book placement
The Library hosts placements for students taking the M.Sc. in Book History and Material Culture offered by the Centre for the History of the Book at the University of Edinburgh. Typical work includes researching the collections, enhancing catalogue descriptions, and producing articles about their work, giving them valuable experience of the professional skills involved in working with rare books and manuscripts.
Holly Boud undertook a placement in our Archives and Manuscript division to work on the Chambers papers. The Library holds two collections relating to Edinburgh publishers W & R Chambers and the Chambers family, and Holly worked on preparing a list of a collection of papers relating to the Chambers family.
Holly said, 'You never know what you will find in archives. My work placement helped me see how the theory I learn in class applies to the field. The theory becomes tangible as you (carefully) handle archival materials. Each descriptive decision matters. Each story is unique, and there are specific people behind the materials. I watched a picture slowly come into better focus.'
Rosie Seidel worked in the maps department of the Library. She said, 'I value and appreciate the hands-on experience I gained, and this placement has made me more confident in my skills.'
Digital Scholarship and the Data Foundry
We launched our new Digital Scholarship Service this year, with the aim of both encouraging and enabling the use of digital tools and techniques with the collections, and building capacity for digital scholarship within the Library.
Digital scholarship is a broad term encompassing the use of computational or digital methods to enable new forms of research, learning, teaching or creative outputs. This means we need to make the Library's collections available in machine-readable form — as data — to support and encourage these new uses of the collections.
This year, we also launched the Data Foundry: home to the Library's 'collections as data'. This includes digitised material, metadata collections, organisational data and geospatial information — all made available as 'datasets' — with plans to include audio-visual data and web archive data in the future.
Within a short space of time, we have already seen considerable engagement with these collections, and the Library's data and Data Foundry featured in nominations for four of the seven categories in the Digital Humanities Awards 2019.
We also established a 'Digital Scholarship Staff Seminar Series' with speakers from Library of Congress, the British Library and universities, and we have begun to offer Library Carpentry staff training (data skills training courses for librarians). The Library is now participating in, and contributing to, the diverse international digital scholarship community at conferences, workshops and events.
3,000 Scottish Chapbooks … as music!
Spanning 200 years, and containing nearly 11 million words, the Chapbooks Printed in Scotland dataset provides exciting opportunities for analysis. Shawn Graham (Carleton University) used computational techniques to group the chapbooks into broad topics and transform this data into music, creating a 'Song of Scottish Publishing'. The result is a musical 'data visualisation' of more than 200 years of Scottish chapbooks.
High Performance Computing meets 'Encyclopaedia Britannica'
Melissa Terras (University of Edinburgh and a Trustee of the Library) and Rosa Filgueira (Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre) have produced some exploratory analysis of the first eight editions of 'Encyclopaedia Britannica', as part of a project to create a Text and Data Mining Platform. Now that the infrastructure is in place to analyse text at scale, the team can begin to ask complex questions of data, and work with historians to see how this changes what they can ask of the sources.
Artist in Residence
Martin Disley joined the Library as our Artist in Residence. Funded by the Creative Informatics AHRC project, Martin is exploring the use of Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) — a form of machine learning — with the collections, to create new artworks.
One early work explores the Tay and Forth Bridge photographic collections, creating images of ghostly bridges.
Data visualisation projects
We have been working with students on the University of Edinburgh's Design Informatics course, who are using Library datasets to learn about, and create, data visualisations. Projects included visualising 100 years of 'Encyclopaedia Britannica' in Minecraft; analysing the spread of disease in 'A Medical History of British India'; and exploring late-19th century Spiritualist Newspapers.
Visit https://data.nls.uk.
Scottish Cultural Heritage Consortium PhD placement
In partnership with the University of Aberdeen, we supervised PhD student Matthew Lee, who investigated the hidden slavery collections at the Library. Matthew's PhD, entitled 'Private reflections and public pronouncements: Caribbean slavery in the Scottish consciousness, 1750–1834' examines the cultural amnesia surrounding Scotland's involvement in slavery and the slave trade.
Matthew identified and catalogued relevant materials, and made them available to researchers through the online catalogue Archives Space. So far, Matthew has catalogued a selection of journals, ledgers, diaries, leases, and letters that all shed light on Scottish connections to the Caribbean slave-trade.
Matthew said: 'This work was fascinating, and sometimes challenging, but it was an important reminder of Scotland's deep involvement in the Atlantic slave trade. The placement gave me some of the skills necessary to work in the cultural heritage sector. I enjoyed getting a behind-the-scenes view of how the Library works as well.'
Fulbright National Library of Scotland Scholar Award
Dr Dana Van Kooy was this year's Fulbright Scholar at the Library. Dana is Associate Professor of Transnational Literature, Literary Theory and Culture in the Humanities Department at Michigan Technological University. Dana's research interests include 18th and 19th-century British and American literature, Romantic-period drama, and circum-Atlantic studies.
Dana's Fulbright award supports research for her current book project 'Atlantic Configurations and the Aesthetics of Disappearance'. This project traces the cultural construction and circulation of specific configurations throughout the Atlantic World during this period of European colonial empires and plantation slavery. One of the purposes of this work is to explore the emergence of modern sensibilities about the relationships between land and people. A particular area of interest relates to the represented conditions of freedom and its loss.
Dana was hosted in the Library's General Collections department to facilitate knowledge exchange. Unfortunately, like the majority of Fulbright award winners, Dana had to return to the United States because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Dana and Library colleagues hope she will be able to return to complete her research in the next year.
We continue to collaborate with Fulbright to appoint further scholars to the National Library of Scotland Award in the spirit of Senator Fulbright's 'avenue of hope'.
Graham Brown Research Fellow
The Graham Brown Research Fellowship supports a three-month period of research into any aspect of mountaineering, including history, exploration, environment and literature. The 2019 Fellow was Dr Simon Naylor, Senior Lecturer in Historical Geography and Head of the Human Geography Research Group at the School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow.
Simon's research focused on the histories of science, technology and exploration. He is interested in the significance of places and landscapes for the development of scientific ideas and techniques. His most recent work has examined the development of the science of meteorology in the 19th century.
Simon used the Fellowship to conduct research into the relationship between mountains, mountaineering and science in Scotland, focusing on weather study and the meteorological observatory on Ben Nevis.
He said: 'The Graham Brown Research Fellowship allowed me to spend a concerted period of time with the Library's world-class map and book collections. The Fellowship was invaluable to me because it provided the resources to focus intensely on a research project, a focus that is otherwise difficult to achieve amidst all the other demands of an academic career. The Library's holdings are incredible and I simply wouldn't have had the time or resources to investigate them in the way that the Fellowship has enabled me to do.'