This article examines the seventeenth-century private library of the Danish noblewoman Karen Brahe (1657-1736). Surviving intact, the collection's contents have been carefully catalogued, offering an entry point into the world of female book owners and users in earlier times. Through quantitative analysis of the digitally encoded bibliographic metadata of the library's catalogue of printed items, this article identifies large-scale patterns across the collection and demonstrates how female book owners in Denmark were connected through their reading to broader European book markets and networks, mapping the interplay between production, distribution, and reception that shaped the book ownership and intellectual life of women in the past.
This paper addresses the role of the invention of tradition in early library history writing and its influence on the subsequent discourse. 'The invention of tradition' is a phrase coined by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger to describe cultural practices that appear traditional but which are of comparatively recent innovation. Examples include neo-classical civic architecture, the symbolic construction of national identities, and the adoption of anachronistic rituals in essentially modern institutions. Hobsbawm and Ranger argue that invented traditions have an important social function in helping to foster cohesion, legitimising authority structures, and cementing social values by rooting contemporary institutions and social practices in a factitious past. This paper argues that early library history writing can be understood as an invented tradition that acted to validate the social function of libraries by appeal to the distant historical past. While library history lacks ritualistic and ceremonial aspects, it displays a similar ideological function in securing an ostensibly novel social institution against the authority of tradition. It first discusses the nature of invented traditions and their relevance to library history. The paper then analyses library history writing between 1859 and 1914, and its influence on subsequent library discourse. Finally the paper analyses the specific tension in the nineteenth century that gave rise to the invented tradition of early library history writing. The paper predominantly addresses the development on library services in Britain.
This paper discusses the library of the Swedish King Oskar II (1829-1907) and its uses for him as a private person and as head of state. It also discusses the transformation of this library from privately owned to an accessible library museum, archive and research facility. The major research questions concern the history of the library from its beginnings in 1853 until today, and its function as a legitimation tool for Oskar II as well as his descendants. In order to study the library, I have used object biography, a method originating in the fields of archaeology and anthropology, but which has several advantages within the framework of the history of libraries and collections as well. The article is based on the author's doctoral thesis in library and information science (LIS) at the University of Boras, Over djupen mot hojden: en biografi over Oskar II:s bibliotek ('Over the depths towards the heights: a biography of Oskar II's library').
This paper describes the origins and impact of Ireland's cross-border mobile library service, which began as a peace and reconciliation project and continues to serve communities along the border between Co. Donegal, Republic of Ireland, and Co. Derry and Tyrone, Northern Ireland. Through an oral history project with the long-time cross-border mobile librarian Denis Doherty, supplemented by literature review and interviews with library staff, this research demonstrates the ongoing success and evolution of the cross-border mobile library service, which has thrived beyond its original project term (2003-06) and continues to serve rural communities along the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, particularly where branch libraries and school libraries are absent. The value of the service lies in the deep care demonstrated by library staff and the flexibility of the mobile library, from the early days of the peace process to addressing chronic loneliness two decades later.
Van Berkhey, Reader in Natural History at the University of Leiden in the Dutch Republic, was financially ruined around 1784-85, an event which led to the sale of his books and manuscripts and his natural history cabinet, which were widely dispersed. He had assembled a famous iconographical collection of over 6,000 drawings and prints of naturalia (many of which he had drawn himself), arranged according to the Linnaean system. These were sold by auction in 1785 as an entity, to an unknown bidder, for the cabinet of King Carlos III of Spain and then preserved in Madrid. This fact has become internationally known only recently. In his auction catalogue, Van Berkhey emphasised the importance of his extensive collection of original drawings of insects, which were models for the engravings in volume 4 of Albertus Seba's Thesaurus (published in 1765). About 200 insect drawings were fraudulently removed from the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales (MNCN) in Madrid around 1982, but in 2009 these were restored to the archive of the MNCN. During the eighteenth century new species were often described, especially by Linnaeus himself, from images in books or drawings, without the addition of illustrations. The Van Berkhey iconographical collection as a whole, still preserved in Madrid, could serve as an important source for solving taxonomic problems since it contains illustrations of new species, so-called iconotypes: if the real type specimen (the holotype) is missing, a good illustration of it can help.
