It is certainly well known that the National Maritime Museum holds a superb and precious collection of objects, paintings and manuscripts. However, it is not as well known that among the Museum’s Library and Manuscript collections are valuable, occasionally priceless, rare books, charts and atlases. November’s Item of the Month is one such volume, the Isolario of Bartolomeo ‘Dalli Sonetti’.

Sonia (Library Assistant)

I hope the title of this blog-post didn’t cause any unpleasant surprises. Having opened the new Caird Library in the summer, we are, of course, staying put. However, regular visitors will know that we haven’t yet had the opportunity to run a full service in the reading room, due to delays with the move of the collections.

Our new purpose built stores have remained empty while we worked to ensure that the environmental conditions in them meet the relevant British standards. This work was vital in order to ensure we preserve our fabulous collections for this and future generations to benefit from.

Happily, I’m able to write about this work in the past tense and last week we moved in the first items. The image on the right shows some of our library books installed on roller racking in the new stores. Amongst the first to be moved was a volume titled Relocating Modern Science. There’s still a long way to go as we relocate modern, slightly out-of-date and even ancient science, along with the rest of our collections. Nevertheless, we’re on the way!

Richard (Assistant Archivist)