University of Glasgow Library
preservation
Preservation Management Programme: quarantine room
As part of the ongoing Pest Management programme at Archive Services we have set up a Quarantine room where we can examine and treat new collections before repackaging them and storing them in the archive. Keeping mould and pests from damaging our collections is an essential part of our Pest Management programme at Archive Services. … Continue reading
19th century photographs online: a tour across the world
Over the past year we’ve brought you images from 19th century photograph albums in Special Collections, including pictures of Australia, prize-winning views of Britain, China, Egypt, France, Italy, India, Japan, and the USA. You can see a selection of over 100 of these images on flickr. Our tour comes to an end back in the British … Continue reading
19th century photographs online: East Asia
A new set of images, showing Japan and China in the 1890s, is now online. Dougan 86 is an intriguing mix of professional photographs and amateur snapshots. Despite the technical flaws and haphazard composition of some of the images, they are an appealing, immediate record of people, places and events. The album contains 124 photographs, mostly albumen with some silver gelatine prints. They … Continue reading
18th century botanical drawings on the mend
These botanical illustrations from the Cullen collection are some of the items which have been treated as part of our Wellcome Trust funded conservation project. MS Cullen 141 was enclosed in a letter to William Cullen (1710-1790) from James Kerr, then living in Calcutta. He appears to have been a former student of Cullen and … Continue reading
Victorian lives in pictures
Another 300 images are now available online from our 19th century photograph albums. The contents of three more albums have been digitised: two feature prize winning images by members of the Amateur Photographic Association (founded in 1861); the third is a fascinating ‘photographers logbook’ owned by Fanny Pickard (born in 1847). Fishing party, Northumberland, 1862 (Dougan 101 item 12) The Association … Continue reading
New Lanark Visitors’ Books
As mentioned previously, Archive Services hold a collection of records of New Lanark Mills. One of the highlights of the collection is the series of visitor books, which tell us more about the people who came to the village to learn more about the community in the early nineteenth century. It was fitting that it … Continue reading
Heritage smells!
Visitors being shown around Special Collections often remark on the distinctive and evocative aroma of old books. We are currently collaborating with a research team based at the University of Strathclyde who are investigating what causes these smells. The heritage smells project team are trying to capture the chemical components of the “smell”. It is hoped … Continue reading
Scotland’s 100 oldest companies
This month David Luck, the Business Archives Council of Scotland (BACS) Surveying Officer working at the University of Glasgow, will start a new project to map out the existing records of the hundred oldest Scottish Companies still registered with Company House. The limited company has allowed Scottish businesses and community groups to flourish and grow … Continue reading
An early experiment in photography
This image from Special Collections shows a ‘photogenic drawing’ of a plant. It was created in around 1839 by William Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of the negative/positive process of photography which he patented as the calotype process in 1841. His earlier experiments with what he called photogenic drawing created this unique negative which is among … Continue reading
19th century photographs online: South Asia
The latest 19th century photograph album to be digitised and made available online is Dougan 96. Most of the 175 photographs are the work of Samuel Bourne (1834-1912), who was based in India in the 1860s as part of the Bourne and Shepherd partnership. He was particularly noted for his landscape photographs but the album … Continue reading
view our photos on flickr
