My name is Madeleine Reynolds, a fourth year PhD candidate in History of Art. I am fortunate to be one of two successful applicants for the position of Archival Provenance Intern with the Heritage Collections, University of Edinburgh. My own research considers early modern manuscript culture, translation and transcription, the materiality of text and […]

We recently acquired this photograph.  It shows the committee which had responsibility for running the University Union, one comprised of both staff and students. We have researched each of the names and found out something further about most of them. At this time and for some time to come, the Union was an all male […]

From time to time we ‘rediscover’ items in our collections.  It’s not that we didn’t know we had them; rather that they have not come to anyone’s specific attention within the many, many items we hold. This is certainly the case with the earliest class list we hold for anatomy students.  It has a comprehensive […]

The mathematician, statistician, writer, composer and musician, Alexander Craig Aitken, was born in Dunedin, New Zealand on 1 April 1895. He was of Scottish descent. He attended Otago Boys’ High School from 1908 to 1912. On winning a university scholarship in 1912 he went on to study at the University of Otago in 1913, enrolling […]

We just answered an internal enquiry for colleagues in or Law School who asked us about numbers of students and staff in the Law Faculty in the early 1950s. The answer stands in contrast to today’s student numbers: Matriculated students (Law) 1952/53 Ordinary Men 275 Women 37 Termly Men 8 Women 0 Total 320 (out […]

The Quatercentenary Collection came about as a result of an appeal that was made as the University of Edinburgh approached its 400th anniversary in 1983.  Former staff, students and others responded and sent in all types of university-related items, from student magazines to prize books, from lecture notes to memoirs, from photographs to degree certificates […]