Books and Borrowing: An Analysis of Scottish Borrowers’ Registers, 1750-1830

Books and Borrowing uncovers and reinterprets the history of reading in Scotland in the period 1750 to 1830 through 144,000 borrowing records across 18 libraries. Find out more

Seeing speech

The resource provides ultrasound tongue imaging (UTI) and lip video of speech, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) video of speech, and 2D midsagittal head animations based on MRI and UTI data. Find out more

James McNeill Whistler: The Etchings

James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) was a major figure in 19th century printmaking and created 490 etchings. Over 9500 impressions of these prints have been located and investigated during the project, which completes a series of catalogues raisonnés of Whistler's oeuvre. Find out more

Interactive Map of Burns Suppers Worldwide

Featuring more than 1000 Burns Suppers across all 7 continents and in 75 countries around the world, this resource seeks to record, illustrate, and offer new insights into the ways in which the tradition of the Burns Supper continues to be maintained, adapted and reimagined in the 21^st century. Find out more

SCOTS: Scottish Corpus Of Texts and Speech

The Scottish Corpora project has created large electronic corpora of written and spoken texts for the languages of Scotland, featuring nearly 4.6 million words of text, with audio recordings to accompany many of the spoken texts. Find out more

The Berwickshire Place-Name Resource

The resource includes historical research for all Berwickshire place-names on the Ordnance Survey 1:50,000 Landranger map, including more than 1,600 place-names and 7,000 historical forms presented via a series of interactive maps. Find out more

People of Medieval Scotland 1093-1371

A database of all known people of Scotland between 1093 and 1314 mentioned in over 8600 contemporary documents. It is also being extended to 1371 to include all those lands, peoples and relationships mentioned in royal charters between 1314 and 1371. Find out more

Consultation Letters of Dr William Cullen (1710-1790) at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh

A publicly accessible, online scholarly edition of one of the most important archives of eighteenth-century medical "consultation letters", containing more than 20,000 digitised pages. Find out more

TheGlasgowStory

As told by some of Scotland's best writers, and illustrated with thousands of images from the collections of the city's world-famous libraries, museums and universities. From football to fashions, Auchenshuggle to Yoker, you'll find it all here. Find out more

The Paintings of James McNeill Whistler: A Catalogue Raisonné

The online catalogue includes some 550 oil paintings and over 1700 works on paper dating from ca 1850 to 1903. The evolution of each painting from sketch to final oil is described and illustrated. Find out more

Week Beginning 20th March 2023

Posted on24th April 202324th April 2023Authorbaitken

This was another two-day week as the UCU strike action continued from Monday to Wednesday. This week I started getting some of the many sites that were taken down due to the College of Arts server compromise back online again. We’re migrating most of the WordPress sites to external hosting and I’ve begun to work with the available tools to generate new child themes for some of the sites, adding in new links to the University’s privacy policy to the footer of each site and ensuring any non-Wordpress content such as APIs and content management systems continue to work. This is going to be a major undertaking with so many sites to migrate and we’ll just have to chip away at it over the coming weeks.

Also this week I completed an initial version of the ‘Browse book’ page in the Books and Borrowing front-end. The page works pretty much exactly as it was specified in the requirements document, apart from a limit by genre not being in place yet. The page presents all of the book editions in the system and works in a similar way to the ‘browse book holdings’ tab when viewing a library. By default the book editions are displayed by title and there are tabs for each initial letter and a count of the number of book editions with titles beginning with the letter. The data for each book edition (and associated book work where available) is listed, with searchable items clickable (e.g. click on an edition title to search for all borrowing records involving this edition). The number of borrowings is also listed as are all of the individual holding records associated with the edition.

You can change the way the book edition data is displayed to select ordering by author or the ‘top 100’ view in addition to title. There is also a date slider that allows you to limit the view to books published within a specific period. There is currently one book in the system with a publication date of 1968 which is why the range currently goes that far – once this has been fixed the range will automatically fix itself too. The range slider is double-ended – drag each end to match the period you’re interested in then press ‘Update’ and the page will reload and will only display book editions published in your chosen range. So for example you can view the ‘top 100’ for books published in different periods and compare them.

Next week I will begin and hopefully finish the ‘Browse borrowers’ page. That then leaves the ‘facts and figures’ (both library and system-wide) plus the integration of genre to tackle. Plus working on the user interface, migrating to Bootstrap and fixing a number of little issues I’ve spotted.