I am officially on maternity leave from today! Next time I visit @innerpeffray.bsky.social, I'll be emulating the Herbinsons and Dunlop families from July 1897 by signing the visitors' book with 'Baby' in tow! 👶

Hi! If anyone has a spare 15 minutes to fill out a short survey about their opinions on museums it would be very much appreciated. Just click this link: forms.gle/LgCSvTSYTjRK... Please repost or share with anyone you feel would also like to take part! #UKmuseums #culturalheritage

Why not start your week with blowing the perfect soap bubbles while running naked and jumping over a skull?

We're looking forward to our Summer Fayre next Friday and Saturday! Local craftspeople, refreshments and lots of secondhand #books

Very exciting to see @physiciansgallery.bsky.social's The People's Dispensary published online! I loved working on this project a few years ago — sometimes I can still see Dr Andrew Duncan's handwriting when I close my eyes... www.rcpe.ac.uk/peoplesdispe...

John Everett Millais was a friend of Rupert Potter, father of Beatrix, and they both enjoyed visiting Scotland. The Potters visited Innerpeffray in 1868 and you can read more in @bibliophisla.bsky.social blog innerpeffraylibrary.co.uk/beatrix-pott...

This is what I have so far for my handover notes, hoping to help myself hit the ground running when I return to the PhD after maternity leave. I think it'll be really helpful. 🙃

#skyhistorians We are looking forward to our Divergent Minds in the Archive workshops in Cardiff (29 July) & Liverpool (14 Aug). There’s still time to sign up & we are looking for a broad group of archive users! We have travel bursaries & can if needed help with hotel accommodation. More details👇

Great fun the last couple of days at @natlibscot.bsky.social comparing nine editions of Murray's Handbook for Scotland (1867-1913), looking at how the descriptions of @innerpeffray.bsky.social as a visitor attraction/tourist destination have changed throughout time. #librarytourism

The government response to this petition is infuriating. “Maternity and other types of Parental Pay are intended to provide a measure of financial security to support parents whilst they are away from the workplace; they are not a replacement of earnings” except they literally are??? Please sign:

Rock on! For #ManiculeMonday here’s a handy example of a reader highlighting text passages that I spotted in @bodleianlibraries.bsky.social MS. Laud Misc. 651 📜🤘

Very important announcement - the bears are back! It's time to watch these beautiful brown bears get super fat over the summer 🐻 explore.org/livecams/bro...

Absolutely not! I do not consent, I don't like it, make it stop.

I've got some reading to do before baby arrives, courtesy of @innerpeffray.bsky.social!

I have witnessed two separate people being SO RUDE to @natlibscot.bsky.social staff today and the NLS staff being unfailingly polite in return. It's not that hard to treat people with common decency - especially when they are just trying to help you!

No email has ever found me well.

I love a little drama on a Wednesday morning! 💒 On 4 May 1872, the Revd and (allegedly) Mrs A. M. Gibson visited @innerpeffray.bsky.social together and signed the visitors' book - but they weren't actually married until the 21st of May, almost three weeks later!

I just stumbled across an old article in The Central Queensland Herald, Australia, by an international visitor to @innerpeffray.bsky.social - Miss Constance Bardsley visited Innerpeffray with 2 others on 1st July, 1937. On her return home, she wrote about her 6-month world tour in her local paper.

It's been a busy year for the Books and Borrowing Team - even though the project technically ended a year ago! Highlights include winning the @bsecs.bsky.social Digital Prize for 2025, a doctorate for @smithjj.bsky.social, and many new publications on the way...

'A Year of Books and Borrowing'- read Katie Halsey's round-up here: borrowing.stir.ac.uk/a-year-of-bo... 😃📖📚

Clearly this display at my local library was a work in progress but also... pretty apt!

Genuine question - how does anyone get anything done while pregnant?? I've just hit the 3rd trimester and I am e x h a u s t e d 😴

On holiday last week I sadly couldn't see the Franciscan Library in Sorrento as it was all covered up by cloth panels (the woman running the exhibition seemed so confused that I actually wanted to see the library itself) but I did get to make traditional paper at a 13th century paper mill in Amalfi!

Very excited for the installation of 'Reading Forms; A Site-Specific Exhibition' today! Gorgeous work by textile Artist Helen Gallogly will be on display at Innerpeffray during May, with a launch event tomorrow eve and tours & talks throughout the month.

Join our team and our special guests Richard Ovenden, Bodley’s Librarian and Sir Alexander McCall Smith, Author for an introduction to Innerpeffray and its collections. There will be a short demonstration a chance to ask questions about the collection and the catalogue.

You can still register to join the Library of Innerpeffray for the launch of its shiny new catalogue at 4pm this afternoon! See you there 📚

It's been a long time coming, but we are at last able to share our full catalogue online and we invite you to join us for the launch.

The framing of palaeography as a challenge to be overcome rather than a useful skill and a joyful exercise is concerning and devalues both this critical ability and of historical research work generally.

Thank you so much to @louisecreechan.bsky.social for her talk on ‘Access, Accommodations, and Rigour, Oh My!: Neurodivergence and Method’ - excuse me while I go look up ndhumanities.com immediately!

Next up at today's @sgsah.bsky.social 'Supporting Neurodivergent PGRs' workshop - @luciejones83.bsky.social

Delighted to be attending a conference online today: "Supporting Neurodivergent PGRs in the Art & Humanities" with @sgsah.bsky.social at the University of Stirling. It's already very comforting to be in a (virtual) room with lots of other people who have similar thoughts to me!

If you are planning a webinar or talk on AI and discussing the negatives and aren’t including copyright issues and intellectual theft, how much it gets wrong, or environmental impacts, then you are not doing the topic justice.

give me your typos. your messy drawings. your silly memes. your cringey joys. your little doodles. your rewrites. your second attempts. your better attempts. your years-in-the-making stunning beauties that make you sigh with contentment at having perfected them at last. just give me works by humans

Very honoured to be a part of this forthcoming publication, Feminist Librarianship, ed. Kirsten MacQuarrie and Leah Higgins @cilipscotland.bsky.social. My contribution reflects on female borrowers @books-borrowing.bsky.social in early c19 Scotland. More info here: www.cilips.org.uk/feminist-lib... !

#FeelGoodFriday The winner of the #BSECS2025 Digital Prize is the Books and Borrowing, 1750-1830 database! The database contains borrowing records from 18 Scottish Libraries, 43,000 register pages, 162,000 borrowing acts #skystorians #18thC 🗃️ @books-borrowing.bsky.social borrowing.stir.ac.uk

Please join us at our forthcoming exhibition, 'Curious Minds: Thomas Pennant and Gilbert White', running April-June 2025 Launch event on April 8th at Gilbert White's House and Gardens, Selborne! (@gilbertwhites.bsky.social)

If your books are among the 7.5 million pirated works on #LibGen, the resource #Meta has been using to train their #AI, you can at least send Meta a letter (using the @authorsguild.bsky.social's handy template) to state that they are violating your copyright. actionnetwork.org/letters/auth...

Hi there! We are the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing. Our members promote research in the history of the book including manuscript culture, print, digital technologies + beyond. Follow to connect with bookish scholarship from around the world + across time periods.

At the opening of the beautiful new "Below Stairs" bookshop, designed by @kgbaston.bsky.social at the National Trust for Scotland's Georgian House in Edinburgh's Charlotte Square.

Hello Bluepals, we are open. Sorry i'm late. It's #worldbookday today, so I asked the books what they wanted to do for a treat. So we've been on the swings, had chips for lunch on the beach, a bit of crazy golf and we did a bit of shopping. We're home now. The books are exhausted now, bless em.

This year's EDITION Spring Lecture will be talk by our Katie Halsey & @mjrsangster.bsky.social titled 'Towards a True History of Reading Lives: Borrowing in Scotland, 1747-1837'! This is an in-person event at the University of Edinburgh on Friday, 21 March 2025: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/professors...

We have a lovely painted copy of the monkfish at @innerpeffray.bsky.social - it's one of my favourite items to show to visitors! (La nature et diversite des poissons, 1555)

I forgot my laptop charger while working at the library on Monday so I scrawled out a bunch of a chapter draft by hand - it turns out that those 1,100 words aren't half bad!

Read on for a botanical love story between nineteenth-century visitors to @innerpeffray.bsky.social! 🧵 #BookHistory #Libraries

Incredible marginal face/manicule/face-icule, in a manuscript of Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiæ. Copied in England in the twelfth century and now MS Dd.6.6 @theulspeccoll.bsky.social #manicule

'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter, for my eyes were too googly.'

I'll be honest, neither of the cats enjoyed this, but I am utterly delighted 🎅🐈🐈‍⬛️

I'd never come across this lovely phrase before today - Robert Scarlett Grignon (visitor to Innerpeffray Library in September 1870) was described in the 1871 Census as a "Clergyman of the Church of England without Care of Souls."

Bit of a family drama in New Mills, 1870. William Mellett, aged nineteen, married Margaret Broadley, aged seventeen. They eloped to Manchester at the end of March and then stayed with Margaret's parents. William was the eldest of a family of eight children and the only working-age boy.

A BIG day for Scottish archives! Great to see the new Your Scottish Archives portal go live. A HUGE thank you to everyone involved in creating this great new resource!