Improving access
One Third Digital target met
We have reached our goal to have a third of our holdings in digital format two years ahead of schedule.
We made a pledge in 2015 to complete the task by 2025 – but our teams hit the target by the middle of 2023, with 33.65 per cent of our collections digitised. As of September 2023, more than 475,000 items from our collections had been digitised since 2017, including medieval manuscripts, maps, the MacKinnon photographic collection, fragile moving image and sound collections, 18th century pamphlets, Scottish broadsides and chapbooks, exam papers, Gaelic works and newspapers.
The project has involved meticulous planning and implementation across a number of our teams. In parallel, there have been developments in local and shared infrastructures for collecting digital legal deposit content. A storage and preservation network across the national libraries has been established, resulting in almost 12 million e-journal issues and articles and nearly 900,000 eBook titles being collected. About half of our legal deposit content is now in digital format.
Moving Image Archive collections
More than 700 items were added to our Moving Image online catalogue by the end of 2023, with about 90 per cent of these made available through our Collections on Tape project.
Highlights include 'The Flower and the Straw' (1955), made by teachers and shown at the Edinburgh Film Festival that year, and 'She Town' (2022) about women in Dundee's working lives. 'She Town' won our purchase prize for moving image.
You can watch both films and many more at our online Moving Image Archive.
Virtual Reading Rooms
Our Virtual Reading Room service officially launched in 2023, with its own dedicated space on our website.
Our desktop and ceiling visualisers allow people to look at items remotely and this service is available to all Library members by request.
We held 41 Virtual Reading Room sessions, with participants from the UK, Europe, USA and Australia. They mainly looked at manuscripts but also rare books and maps.
The desktop visualiser was also used successfully during two events. The first was with the National Archives, when we demonstrated film strips to a conference audience in London. The second was a collaboration with Glasgow's Mitchell Library, to produce an online event discussing and showing relevant material from our Robert Burns collections.
Collections on Tape goal success
More than 5,850 video tapes had been digitised by June of 2023 – ahead of target for our Collections on Tape project to preserve our audio visual magnetic tape collections.
This included more than 500 items from our acquisitions backlog plus items from our General Collections and Archives and Manuscript collections.
The project had also digitised 470 sound carriers by June.
The purchase of two additional TASCAM recording machines has helped to grow our capacity.
Read all about it! Newspapers go digital
Work on the newspapers of our partner libraries is now wrapping up. A subset of titles from Culture Perth & Kinross, the Mitchell Library, Western Isles and Aberdeen have been conserved.
Conservation work on our own holdings remains in progress, alongside assessments that will improve our wider knowledge of the collection.
Advocacy efforts to promote the conservation work have gone global, with the work by conservator Claire Hutchison (pictured) now published as a paper under the International Federation of Libraries Associations and Institutions. This paper is helping showcase the digitisation project and act as a benchmark for other national projects.
Over the past year, 4,913 newspapers were digitised. View our newspapers and learn more about their conservation by viewing the video 'Saving local newspapers for the nation'.
Maps digitisation
More than a quarter of a million maps now online
There are now 270,000 maps freely accessible on our website after we exceeded our target to digitise 15,000 single-sheet maps last year – more than 16,000 had been added by June 2023.
These include geological maps of England and Wales, complementing those of Scotland. We also created combined geological maps of Britain pages with a single graphic index.
Other maps added online include two series which show land use and agricultural potential at one-inch to the mile scale for England and Wales.
Locating Scotland's historic woodlands
A landmark project has created a comprehensive digital record of historic Scottish woodlands.
We partnered with Zulu Ecosystems – a nature regeneration platform – to pinpoint the woods' locations and make the OS First Series Woodland viewer available on our website.
Machine learning was used to create a digital layer to extract the woodland from our Ordnance Survey 1st edition maps, which date back to the 1840s. This data was also compared with present-day satellite imagery.
Identifying historic woodland is vital for understanding the scale of its decline from factors such as overgrazing, deforestation and climate change.
Zulu Ecosystems developed and donated the digital layer to contribute towards the conservation and protection of ancient woodland.
'What's On' revamp
We launched the new 'What's On' section of our website in December, which showcases our extensive programme of in-person and online events, exhibitions and workshops across our sites.
The clear listings – all highlighted by a prominent image – take people to each event's own page for further information.
People can also use the filter function to find events of interest to them and can sign up for our email newsletter to receive information about upcoming events direct to their inbox.
Fast Pass success
We launched our Fast Pass to offer visitors one-day access to study spaces without the need for a library card.
People can enter the General Reading Room and Discovery Room and view general reference books and online resources without the need to show proof of address and personal ID.
The Fast Pass is proving popular with visitors from Scotland and abroad, with more than 100 issued during the first four weeks of a trial period.
Those who used one cited reasons such as wanting a look at our reading rooms or short-term study space.
Supporting Learning, Research and Discovery
Fitba Research Club: Andrew Watson's Legacies
Our 'Fitba Research Club: Andrew Watson's Legacies' project was inspired by the story of Andrew Watson, Scotland's – and the world's – first Black international football captain.
Co-curated with author, poet and academic Malik Al Nasir, the project brought together a team of community curators – all between the ages of 18 and 25 from under-represented and minority communities across Glasgow – to celebrate the rich history of sporting achievement by Black people and people of colour in Scotland.
Working with our curators, specialist facilitators and other experts through 11 workshops and events from July 2023 to January 2024, the team explored Watson's life and career.
Engaging with collections in the Library and beyond, the community curators also researched other largely forgotten footballing histories from the 1870s on, co-producing a forthcoming online resource.
Supporting school and college students
We've been working to deliver more services to Advanced Higher and college students.
We offer in-person and online sessions to support their studies
and we've had students visit from Edinburgh, Perth, the Borders and Angus.
We also developed an 'Open Shelves' area to give students instant access to relevant items from our collections.
Student feedback has been incredibly positive. One student said: "The staff and everyone at the Library were lovely; it was a pleasure talking to our guides. The resources we were told about seem really helpful and I look forward to using them to write my Advanced Higher dissertation. Thank you to NLS for everything."
Other feedback has praised the sessions as "brilliant and interactive" and "an invaluable opportunity". Teachers thanked our "warm and friendly" staff for ensuring sessions are as "accessible" as possible.
One of our Reference Services assistants said: "It's a great way for us to introduce the Library and its collections to a younger audience."
Archive of Tomorrow
We led on this ground-breaking and collaborative research project, which collected and preserved online information and misinformation about health and the Covid pandemic.
Archive of Tomorrow – which ran from February 2022 until November 2023 – aimed to help address one of the most pressing research issues of modern times: how can the story of changing online health information be captured and understood?
The project, funded by the Wellcome Trust, also explored access, ethical and rights issues connected to online health information. More than 3,400 websites were archived and preserved in the 'Talking about Health' collection of the UK Web Archive. Learn more about the Archive of Tomorrow
Showcasing our research
Our first 'Research Review' was published, highlighting our research projects and collaborations from 2022 2023. Research is a key element of our 2025 strategy, 'Reaching People', and we are a core part of Scotland's research infrastructure. through our collection, preservation and provision of access to millions of resources. Read the full report (Word document) (16 pages; 1.03 MB).
Celebrating LGBT JOY
Our boardroom was transformed into legendary nightclub JOY to celebrate LGBT History Month in February 2024.
JOY was once Scotland's largest LGBT club night and ran for more than 25 years after launching in Edinburgh in 1993.
Members of our team served as DJs, with the house music being played sparking discussions about the role of the gay scene in Edinburgh in the 1990s and the fading club scene.
Most of the people who attended were former JOY patrons and the hour-long event was fully booked. We were able to showcase our LGBT collecting strengths and interests, with possible JOY ephemera donations to follow.
We also marked at LGBT History Month at Kelvin Hall, with an event with LGBT Youth Scotland and Community Archives and Heritage Group Scotland. This also featured the launch of '(Un)seen, (Un)heard', a three-year Heritage Lottery-funded project to capture and preserve the stories of LGBTQ+ young people in Scotland. This will become a new archive at the Library.
Projects at George IV Bridge in late 2023 supported '(Un)seen, (Un)heard', with LGBT groups from Edinburgh, Glasgow and Selkirk joining us, plus intergenerational volunteers from Lavender Menace.
Over the past year we have been welcoming LGBT Youth Scotland groups for tours and workshops, plus staff have been hosting workshops at community centres.
Meanwhile, we celebrated Edinburgh Pride Day in June 2023 by showing films from our Moving Image and Sound collections and members of our staff LGBT+ Network hosted a stall at West Lothian Pride in July.
Such outreach work emphasizes that we are a welcoming space for everyone.
Women's archives
Material from our archives relating to women – from political reports and suffrage literature to knitting patterns – was examined as part of an outreach workshop with students from the University of Glasgow's MSc in Gender History course.
The items chosen (pictured below) offered a lens onto histories of gender in 19th and 20th-century Scotland and highlighted the depth and variety of our archives relating to women.
One participant said: "It was a wonderful overview to the NLS, with a great mix of practicalities as well as interesting content. I feel not only confident in my ability to access resources but excited to have the chance to do so."
'Our Heritage, Our Stories'
We are a key partner in the 'Our Heritage, Our Stories' strand of the 'Towards a National Collection' project, along with the University of Glasgow.
'Towards a National Collection' aims to open up UK heritage to the world by breaking down barriers between different collections and improving access for researchers. For 'Our Heritage, Our Stories', we have contributed content and cataloguing data from our moving image, sound and manuscript collections, with a focus on community archives, Scots and Gaelic.
We're also working on case studies about how we help community groups manage digital collections.
Artificial intelligence symposium
Our first AI and Machine Learning Symposium was held in April 2023, with a full house attending at George IV Bridge and more than 500 participants online.
The keynote speakers were Professor Sir Adrian Smith from the Alan Turing Institute and Chris van der Kuyl, Co-founder and Chairman of 4J Studios, alongside university librarians, academics and PhD students.
Scottish Youth Parliament hails our 'inspirational' curator
Our curator Sarah Thomson was invited to be the keynote speaker at the 80th sitting of the Scottish Youth Parliament (SYP) in October 2023.
The SYP Chair thanked her for an "inspirational and fun" talk about her time as an SYP member and how it has helped her career, including her work with us as our Government and Civic Literacy Curator.
Members of the SYP also visited us at George IV Bridge in early 2024 and worked with Sarah to design a display for the Scottish Parliament for the Festival of Politics in August. We also loaned the items for this project.