What Nicola Knows

Worrying about Nicola Sturgeon’s sleep
keeps me awake the night before the general election.
Three to four hours a night, she tells us on the radio.
I wake at three, wondering if she’s up.

I get her sorted: Vote first thing, then pep talks
for candidates. The afternoon’s for sleep.
She slips off her stilettos, lies fully clothed
on the bed’s shiny cover. Her tights crackle with static.

In her dream she’s riding a long-legged horse
through an avenue of trees. She’s so high up,
she can’t hear the men who are holding the reins.
One is chastising the horse for stopping.

But Nicola doesn’t mind how fast or slow she goes.
She’s never seen inside the canopy of trees before.
She’s surprised to find that she can identify each one –
elm, beech, ash. Birds too – chiffchaff, bullfinch.

When Nicola wakes, she feels more…

All workplaces have their rules and procedures for staff, and libraries are no different.

We recently came across a volume of old staff instructions, and some of them are so odd that we had to share them with you.

How about this for starters:

Our procedures for new members of staff have changed over the years as well:

And woe betide you if your essay was written in a slovenly hand:

That would be me shelving books then…  though I’d have to treat the dusty ones properly and not be ‘foolish’:

Look out for more historic staff instructions soon, including guidance on dealing with young people. And ‘foreigners’.

Edinburgh Libraries is home to a collection of around 100 000 photographs.

We want these pictures to be seen by as many people as possible, so back in 2007 we started digitising photos and uploading them to the Capital Collections website.

But would you believe the everyday hairdryer has become an integral part of the process? Here’s how.

We discovered that many of the images had been mounted using sticky tape and in some cases the glue was starting to mark the image.

Around 80% of the collection was affected, many more than we could ever afford to have conserved by a professional.  Fortunately the glue had not yet seeped through to the image on most of the items but we needed to take action quickly.

Working with EDFAS (Edinburgh Decorative Fine Art Society) we recruited a dedicated team of volunteers who have been using a relatively low-tech tool to help remove the…

The annual Moth International Short Story Prize is back and accepting entries until the closing date of June 30th, 2015. There’s some great prizes for this competition including €3,000 for the winner and a 2nd prize of a writing retreat at Circle of Misse. The three winning stories will also feature in the autumn 2015 issue of The Moth.

The word limit for this competition is up to a maximum of 6,000 words which is wonderful for those writers whose stories don’t fit neatly into the usual 2,000 to 3,000 limits of these types of competitions.

The entry fee is €12 per story and the competition will be judges by Donal Ryan, author of The Spinning Heart.

You can read “Emily” by Mandy Beaumont, the winning entry from last year’s competition here.

Bertram Limited, Sciennes was founded in 1821 in Edinburgh and soon developed into a major manufacturer of papermaking machinery.

Brothers George and William Bertram set up a workshop near Sciennes with a few machines and a small forge, later moving to new, larger premises around 1859 to a site which it was to occupy for over a century.

Bertrams was a very family orientated company where you’d find several members of the same family working alongside each other. They produced The Bertrams Family Magazine where in each issue, were published photos and articles about the company’s many social activities and sports teams.

Our collection has been made possible thanks to Bill Hall who followed his father and uncle into the Bertrams workplace and who shared with us many of his own personal photographs taken throughout his family’s time there.

Bill’s father, Joe (top row centre) and Uncle Willie (top row…