National Library of Scotland facts for kids
Quick facts for kids National Library of Scotland |
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| The main building on George IV Bridge | |
| Country | Scotland |
| Type | National library |
| Established | 1925 |
| Reference to legal mandate | National Library of Scotland Act 1925 & 2012 |
| Location | Edinburgh, Scotland, UK |
| Coordinates | 55°56′55″N 3°11′31″W / 55.948554°N 3.191899°W |
| Collection | |
| Size | 14 million printed items |
| Legal deposit | Yes, provided in law by:
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| Access and use | |
| Access requirements | Open to anyone with a need to use the collections and services |
| Other information | |
| Budget | Operating budget 2018/19 £15.480 million |
| Director | Dr John Scally, National Librarian and Chief Executive |
| Staff | 340 |
The National Library of Scotland (NLS) (Scottish Gaelic: Leabharlann Nàiseanta na h-Alba, Scots: Naitional Leebrar o Scotland) is Scotland's main library. It's a special kind of library called a legal deposit library. This means it has the right to get a copy of almost every book, magazine, and newspaper published in the UK and Ireland. It's one of the biggest libraries in the United Kingdom.
The NLS holds over 24 million items. These include books, handwritten notes, old letters, postcards, photos, and newspapers. It also has Scotland's Moving Image Archive, which is a huge collection of over 46,000 videos and films. Some very famous items in the library are copies of the Gutenberg Bible, a letter from Charles Darwin about his book On the Origin of Species, and the First Folio of Shakespeare. The library also has the world's largest collection of material in the Scottish Gaelic language.
Contents
Library Buildings
The main building of the National Library of Scotland is in Edinburgh city centre. It's located on George IV Bridge, between the old part of the city and the University of Edinburgh. This building is very important and is a Category A listed building.
The library often holds exhibitions here. These shows explore different topics, like Scotland's history or famous writers. Since it's not a lending library, people visit this building to read and study original materials in special rooms.
Reading Rooms for Research
There are different reading rooms in the George IV Bridge building:
- General Reading Room - This room is for researching with newer books (published after 1850), journals, and newspapers.
- Special Collections Reading Room - Here, you can look at very old and rare items, like old books and handwritten documents.
- Multimedia Room - This room is for looking at things that aren't written, such as microfilms and photographs.
Causewayside Building
There's also a more modern building on Causewayside, built in the 1980s. This building stores many special collections, like maps and science books. It also provides a lot of extra storage space.
- Maps Reading Room - In this room, visitors can look at maps, atlases, and books about maps.
Kelvin Hall Centre
The newest part of the NLS is the Kelvin Hall public centre in Glasgow, opened in 2016. This centre lets people access the library's digital collections and its Moving Image Archive. Smaller exhibitions are also held here.
History of the Library
The National Library of Scotland started from a much older library called the Advocates Library. This library opened in 1689. In 1710, a law called the Copyright Act gave it the right to receive a copy of every book published in Great Britain. Over the years, the library grew by buying more books and manuscripts. It became a national library in all but name.
By the 1920s, it was too expensive for a private group to run such a large library. So, a businessman named Alexander Grant gave £100,000 to help. Because of his gift, the library's collections were given to the nation. The National Library of Scotland was officially created by a special law in 1925.
Alexander Grant gave another £100,000 in 1928. This money, along with government funding, helped build a new library on George IV Bridge. Work on the new building started in 1938 but was stopped by World War II. It was finally finished in 1956.
By the 1970s, the library needed more space for its growing collections. The Causewayside Building was opened in two stages, in 1989 and 1995. This provided much-needed space for staff and storage.
Since 1999, the Scottish Parliament has funded the library. It is still one of only six legal deposit libraries in the UK and Ireland. The library is managed by a group of trustees.
In 2009, parts of the building were flooded when a water pipe burst. Only a few items were slightly damaged. Also in 2009, the last letter written by Mary, Queen of Scots was shown to the public for the first time in a long while.
In 2013, the library hired a Wikipedian in residence. This person works to improve Wikipedia articles related to the library and its collections. In 2016, they hired a Gaelic Wikipedian in residence too.
Archives and Collections
The National Library of Scotland has many different collections. Some of the largest and most important ones are described here.
John Murray Archive
The John Murray Archive is a very large collection with over one million items. It includes documents, letters, and business papers from the House of John Murray. This was a famous British publisher that worked with writers like Jane Austen, Herman Melville, Charles Darwin, and Lord Byron.
India Papers
The India Papers collection has over 4,200 bound books and 40,000 individual reports. It contains reports, photos, and government letters about the British Raj in India. This collection is very rare and is the largest of its kind in the UK, after the British Library's collection. It covers topics like medicine, travel, art, human rights, and military history.
Minto Papers
The Minto Papers include over 2,000 documents about the Elliot family. This British family was important in the 17th century. This collection helps us learn about British politics, Scottish history, and events in 19th-century Canada, Italy, and British India.
Patrick Leigh Fermor Archive
The Patrick Leigh Fermor Archive is a collection of items related to Patrick Leigh Fermor, a British travel writer and adventurer. The library bought this collection in 2012. It has over 10,000 items, including photos, sketches, films, war reports, books, and postcards.
Moving Image Archive
The Moving Image Archive holds over 46,000 moving images, like films, TV shows, and short video clips. The library got this collection in 2007 and renamed it in 2015. More than 2,600 items from this collection are available online for free. You can also watch them at the Kelvin Hall centre.
Maps
The National Library of Scotland has over two million maps and other map-related items. This makes it the largest map collection in Scotland and one of the biggest in the world. The library has maps of many different places, like estates, counties, railways, World War I trenches, and mountains.
The map collections include:
- Over 1.5 million sheet maps
- 15,000 atlases (books of maps)
- 100,000 maps on microfilm
- Over 200,000 digital maps
- Books about maps and map-making
- Other map-related items
Bartholomew Archive
The Bartholomew Archive is a very important map collection. It was given to the NLS in 1995 by the Bartholomew family. This collection is a great source of information about John Bartholomew and Son Ltd., a famous map-making company based in Edinburgh. It's one of the largest map archives available for public research.
Board of Ordnance Collection
The library has about 375 military maps and plans. These were made in the 1700s by the Board of Ordnance for government troops during the Jacobite period. The collection includes maps of routes, forts, and Highland towns.
Stevenson Collection
The Stevenson Collection has many 19th and 20th-century maps, drawings, and building plans. These are from the Stevenson family, who were Scottish engineers. They were famous for building lighthouses, harbours, and other big construction projects. The collection mainly covers their work in the United Kingdom, but also includes some works from Japan and New Zealand.
Theatre Collections
The National Library of Scotland has many interesting materials about Scottish theatre. These items are found in different collections. The library has a wide range of theatre materials, including scripts, business papers, stage sets, theatre programmes, and photographs.
20th and 21st Century Theatre
Many theatre items from the 1900s and 2000s are in the library's general Archives and Manuscript Collection. These include plays, music hall items, posters, programmes, and materials from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. You can view these items in the Special Collections Reading Room. Theatre from the 20th century can also be seen on film in the Moving Image Archive.
The Set of The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black, Black Oil
The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black Black Oil is a Scottish play by John McGrath. It tells the story of how the Scottish Highlands changed over time, from the Highland Clearances to the oil boom. The stage set for this play was designed by Scottish artist John Byrne in 1973. It looks like a giant pop-up book.
The NLS bought the set in 2009. It is currently on loan to V&A Dundee until 2043. When opened, the Cheviot set is over 4 metres long and over 2 metres tall. It's the largest book at the National Library of Scotland! It has 5 different scenes painted by Byrne, including a Highland landscape and a Native American Tipi. The NLS has also made a 3D digital version, so you can view it online at the Cheviot 3D section of their website.
Pre-20th Century Theatre
The library has many early English plays, mostly in the Bute Collection. This includes early versions of William Shakespeare's plays, like A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Taming of the Shrew, Hamlet, and Othello. The Bute Collection also has plays from other famous writers from the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline periods.
18th Century Items
Even before Scotland's first public theatre opened in 1736, plays were performed in other places like schools and local festivals. The NLS has early editions of several Scottish plays printed before 1736 that would have been performed this way.
The library also holds some early editions of The Gentle Shepherd (1725) by Scottish poet Allan Ramsay. This play was turned into a popular musical and was a favourite on the Scottish stage.
19th Century Items
The library has a large collection of playbills from the Theatre Royal, Edinburgh. These advertise performances and events from 1807 to 1851. The NLS also has books from the lawyer and author Theodore Martin, which are mostly about his wife, the actress Helena Faucit.
The Weir Collection is a major resource for 19th-century theatre materials. It contains over 500 playbills, posters, programmes, photos, and newspaper clippings from the 1800s. One of the earliest playbills advertises a performance of Rob Roy in 1829. The collection also has attractive pictorial posters from the late 19th century, showing scenes from plays or portraits of actors.
Mountaineering and Polar Collections
The NLS has three large collections that make it an important place to study mountains, mountaineering, and the Arctic and Antarctic regions. The collections focus on climbing, but also include materials on nature, hillwalking, mountains in art, and geology. The Alps and the Himalayas are well covered, as is the exploration of the Arctic and Antarctica.
Graham Brown Collection
The Graham Brown collection was given to the library in 1961 by Professor Thomas Graham Brown. He was a physiologist (someone who studies how living things work). This collection has over 20,000 items. These include books about the history of Alpine climbing, books on Arctic exploration, mountaineering journals, postcards, and photos. Much of the material is personal, like Brown's climbing diaries and letters. The collection also has many 19th and 20th-century maps, especially from Switzerland, French, and Italian areas.
Graham Brown Research Fellowship
The Graham Brown Research Fellowship started in 2018. It supports researchers who want to study any part of mountaineering, including its literature, history, or environment. The first person to receive this fellowship was Alex Boyd, an artist and photographer. He focused on the cultural importance of mountains in Scotland.
Lloyd Collection
The Lloyd Archive mainly contains books and journals about the Alps. It was given to the library by Robert Wylie Lloyd, who was interested in insects and art. There are about 2,000 items in this collection. Many are in English, but some are in French, German, Italian, and Latin. Older books in the collection are about the history and geography of Switzerland. Newer works focus on the natural history and geology of the country. The collection also includes guidebooks for Switzerland and illustrated journals of Alpine trips.
Wordie Collection
The Wordie collection focuses on Arctic and Antarctic exploration. It was put together by Sir James Mann Wordie, a British explorer. The library got this collection in 1959. It has nearly 5,000 items, including books, journals, pamphlets, maps, and letters. The collection includes scientific reports, popular travel stories, and information about whale-fishing and folklore. The oldest item is a book called Purchas his Pilgrimage from 1614.
Official Publications
The National Library of Scotland has a large collection of official documents. This is because of the 1710 Copyright Act and its history as the library of the Faculty of Advocates. These official publications mostly relate to the UK Parliament and other UK government bodies, like the Scottish Parliament. The NLS also receives materials from other countries, including the United States. The India Papers are a great example of a large collection of official publications.
Scottish Parliament Documents
The library holds many documents related to the Scottish Parliament. This includes records from the first surviving Act of Parliament in 1235. All Acts of Parliament are sent to the NLS because of the 1925 National Library of Scotland Act. You can look at these materials in the reading rooms. The library also has various business publications from the Scottish Parliament. Those printed up to September 2015 can be seen physically. Publications after September 2015 are available digitally.
UK Parliament Documents
The library keeps a full archive of UK Parliament publications from the 1800s to today. One important publication is the House of Lords Journal, which dates from 1509 to the present day. It records everything that happens in the House of Lords. The NLS has also worked with ProQuest to digitize 3,000 volumes of House of Lords material to protect the original papers.
United States Documents
The NLS has a large collection of US federal government information. They received these through an exchange with the Library of Congress from 1950 to 1994. The library received about 10% of the USA's monthly official publications. Much of this collection is still being organized. However, there is a growing amount of material available online, including information from the White House and the US Government Publishing Office's Digital system.
Images for kids
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Causewayside annexe (opened in 1988)
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'Hark! Hark! The dogs do bark!' World War I Map in Cartoon Form, 1914
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Map from the NLS Bartholomew Collection
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Lighthouse Image from the NLS Stevenson Collection
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John Byrne's Set of The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black Black Oil
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Title page for William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream
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Title page from a William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew
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Thomas Graham Brown
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Himalayan View, from the NLS Graham Brown Collection
See also
In Spanish: Biblioteca Nacional de Escocia para niños
