The Scottish
Book Trade Archive Inventory (SBTAI) provides a fully
searchable index of manuscript papers held in Scotland
relating to printers, publishers, and papermakers. Covering
the nineteenth century, the first phase of the project
pilot was completed in 2006 with support from the Arts
and Humanities Research Council and is now available
online.
Crucial as
it is to the book historian, this archival material
is also of considerable importance to researchers in
other disciplines, most obviously business, intellectual,
cultural, and literary historians. While the inventory
is intended to meet a felt need among scholars of Scottish
culture, it is also intended to appeal to scholars of
other national traditions. There have for centuries
been considerable business connections between the Scottish
book trades and their British and European counterparts.
Of equal importance have been the imperial connections
of Scottish firms.
The majority
of today's book history research is archivally oriented,
involving intensive use, quantification, and analysis
of archival material. Despite an increasing scholarly
demand for these collections they can be difficult to
access and important research is often frustrated by
the distributed nature of these resources, while institutions
which care for such collections are placed under increasing
pressure to aid researchers from across various disciplines
to map their holdings in this field. Such a unified
resource is therefore a prime desideratum, and will
revolutionise both access to and understanding of these
records.
To date the
SBTAI covers the nineteenth century and funding
is presently being sought to extend these records and
to add material for the seventeenth, eighteenth, and
twentieth centuries.
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