A visit to the National Library of Scotland - Maps

The chatty cheeky Luca, using his uncomparable networking skills at the CILIP Conference months and months ago, got to know the lovely and knowledgeable Alison, who works at the National Library of Scotland, for the Maps Collections. And a mail after another, thinking about our chartership and curious to see her wonderful workplace, the idea of a visit to the NLS was born and became reality at the beginning of August. (we are writing only now because life happened: all of us changed jobs since August at least once.

At.
Least.

Our breakfast retreat

After a glorious breakfast at a local vegan cafe, we met Alison at the NLS map building on Causeway. After some brief and bookish salutations, the usual housekeeping and the ‘in case of fire’ procedures, Alison introduced us to the history of the building: we were quite surprised to hear that it used to be a biscuit factory, until 1925, when it was annexed to the National Library.

Elena's favourite world plushie

NLS is the legal repository for Scotland and acquires a lot of UK and Irish publications. So it is easy to understand why it is the largest reference library in Scotland, world-leading library for materials on Scottish History. We were also surprised to find out that the map library does not only have maps, but also different miscellany, like the Stevenson collection (comprising of rare books on lighthouses and harbours), admiralty charts, journals, bound newspapers (to our amusement, we were able to see some old volumes of La Stampa, an Italian newspaper). There is also a strongroom where some material is kept mainly for conservation and preservation reasons.
And then board games, a world plushy (the cutest and softest globe Elena has ever seen), shoes with a map print and so on: magnificent and disparate stuff we wouldn’t imagine to find there.

We have been fascinated by the stories that Alison told us, and we were somewhat surprised by the skills and generous amount of patience that all librarians in the map library must have: all maps are placed in drawers, usually to accommodate the various maps sizes, and in the drawer, the order is randomised. We loved the idea that librarians still have such a fun job to go and find maps (and other materials) using their visual memory on top of the catalogue location. The building develops into so many floors that 'kudos to the librarians!' (but there is an elevator...)

A lot of effort has been put to digitise some of the maps that are now available on the library catalogue. Alison explained the process involved, and we could not be more fascinated! Everything sounded so magical, and she was talking about taking pictures! Are we easily impressed librarians? No, we think that their job is essential to grant access to this wealth of knowledge to the world and the success of their efforts is mirrored by the success of the NLS website!
On the matter of copyright, maps like the Ordnance Survey have 50 years embargo. It has been done an amazing job of digitisation, and all the maps older than 50 years have been uploaded onto the NLS website (for the more recent ones, there is an £18 fee to access them).

Shock arose when Alison told us that they have a “forbidden” collection that sees a Gutenberg Bible, just near porn material and aromatherapy! While due to a misplaced key we were not able to enjoy the exclusive visit to the building balcony, we did still have a chance to look at historical maps of our country of origin. Luca found his own tiny 5000 souls town in an 18th Century map of Sardinia, with an unusual spelling that he had never heard of. We also had a chance to meet the new librarian that will curate Iain Ranking collection, recently donated by Iain himself to the NLS. We are really looking forward to seeing how many fascinating materials that collection will hold! Here are some pictures of the day. We had fun, and you, what are you waiting to visit the NLS Maps? Their outreach service is the best.

“Is not about geography, is about where to find it”

Reference room

Map detail: Corsica and Sardinia map; 1805

Dearest vestige of libraries from the past

Luca's small town, with an odd spelling, Canessa, at the bottom, left

Elena's region in a map