National Library of Scotland-July 23

After a nine hour bus ride from London to Edinburgh the previous day, we visited the National Library of Scotland (NLS) where we were greeted by David, Senior Curator of the John Murray Archive. David explained that the NLS is a copyright deposit and reference-only library. The NLS is especially proud of its 2005, $62 million purchase of the John Murray Archive which contains over 150,000 documents from one of Britain's greatest 19th century publishing houses. John Murray was the first publisher for many great works including: Charles Darwin's On the Origin of the Species, Jane Austen's Emma, and Samuel Coleridge's Kubla Khan. "Ideas That Shaped The World" (picture above) is an amazing, innovative interactive display of eleven Murray-published authors including: Charles Darwin, Benjamin Disraeli, Sir Walter Scott, David Livingstone, and Robert Peel. We were shown an informative PowerPoint presentation of John Murray Publishers. One quote from the presentation about the importance of publishing books really caught my attention--"[Publishing books is like] dropping sparks into the tinder of our imagination."

The NLS's total collection is worth $150 million. Scotland's Heritage Council funds the NLS at an annual rate of $17 million. Other interesting NLS statistics: 8,000 items received daily, 50,000 items being digitized, 2 million maps, 300,000 sheet music items, and 13 million items in printed collections.