THE BATTLE OF WATERLOO REFLECTED IN OUR ARCHIVE COLLECTIONS On Sunday 18 June 1815, on the muddy fields of Waterloo just outside Brussels in today’s Belgium, Napoleon Bonaparte with his French Imperial Guard faced off the Duke of Wellington and the British and Allied army. The course of the Battle of Waterloo, notable officers and […]

LIBER AMICORUM OF TOKYO ARTISTS On behalf of Edinburgh University Library, the Centre for Research Collections has recently acquired an example of a Japanese painting album – gassaku-jo or liber amicorum. There are three main groups of Japanese painting albums: jiteki-jo, being painting albums made by a single artist; gassaku-jo , being albums contributed to by […]

LAST LOSSES OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR, 1939-1945 – Christian Salvesen & Co. 22 March 2015 is the 70th anniversary of the sinking of the steam cargo vessel Empire Kingsley. Its sinking during the closing phase of the Second World War was the last maritime loss suffered by the general shipping and whaling firm Christian […]

A university figure that deserves far greater recognition is our first woman professor Elizabeth Wiskemann (1899-1971), who held the Montague Burton Chair of International Relations from 1958 to 1961. Although her name is absent from subsequent published histories, the University Journal for May 1958 certainly grasped the significance of her arrival. Announcing ‘the first woman […]

Assisted by the College, a small but interesting archive of material relating to the Edinburgh University literary review, The Jabberwock, has been acquired by the Centre for Research Collections (Special Collections) for Edinburgh University Library. The Jabberwock was an Edinburgh University literary journal, or review, starting in the 1940s and running to the late-1950s, and […]

Recently, a group of 13 sketch-books by the Scottish architect Charles Lovett Gill were acquired by the Centre for Research Collections (Special Collections) for Edinburgh University Library. Gill was notable for his long-term architectural partnership with Professor Sir Albert Edward Richardson (1880-1964). Gill was born in 1880. He trained as an architect with E. G. […]

DRAWING & SKETCHING, STUDYING & RESEARCHING, TRAVELLING & DREDGING, DESCRIBING MOLLUSCS & SHELLFISH, MUSEUM CURATION & PALAEONTOLOGY, PRESIDING OVER SCIENTIFIC BODIES & CLASSIFIYING TERTIARY FORMATIONS, AND LECTURING – ALL IN A SHORT BUT PACKED 39-YEARS… PROFESSOR EDWARD FORBES… ‘A BRILLIANT GENIUS’… 12 February 2015 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth in Douglas, Isle of […]

‘Connected Collections’, Library of Innerpeffray, 29 November 2014 Last Saturday, I was at the wonderful Library of Innerpeffray, Scotland’s oldest lending library (founded ca. 1680) for ‘Connected Collections’, a workshop organised by Jennifer Barnes and Chris Murray of the University of Dundee. This was designed as a forum for academics, archivists, library and museum professionals, […]

Today, His Serene Highness Prince Albert II of Monaco visited the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Innovation (ECCI), and met the Director of ECCI and staff from the School of Geosciences at the University’s remodelled Old High School in High School Yards . The evening before – Thursday 16 October 2014 – a number of items from […]

After the recent BBC whaling documentary produced by KeoFilms / KeoNorth– entitled ‘Britain’s whale hunters: the untold story’ – a spike in enquiries about the archive of the former whaling firm Christian Salvesen & Company of Leith was anticipated. To meet this, some light work has been carried out on the archive, largely to ease […]