Artists’ Studio – Waterlines Family Fun

In Saturday’s family fun session the participants were encouraged to use inspiration from the artwork of Will Maclean and Marian Leven to create their own sculptures and collage.  The participants were asked to create art in a shoebox, a very hefty challenge and all of them gave fantastic results.

As a volunteer I was very impressed with the quantity of effort, hard work and artwork all of which were brilliant. Different participants went about the process in different ways with results varying from a seascape to an abstract and decorative box.

All the materials used were recycled, showing that even a shoe box and fruit box can be given a new lease of life.

The comfy corner was also greatly appreciated by some of the younger participants.

Our next family fun session will be in the Easter Holidays on Wednesday 3rd April, we hope to see you there.

Posted by: Alice (Volunteer)

Guest Book – Ancient Egyptian explorers!

Over the last few weeks we’ve had lots of visits from schools studying Ancient Egypt, it must be a popular subject this term! We’ve got lots more to come before the Easter holidays but in the last few weeks we’ve had visits from:

• St. Fergus Primary School, P4
• Milltimber Primary School, P4/5
• Balmedie Primary School, two P3 classes
• Portlethen Primary School, P3
• Oyne Primary School, P3/4

While they are here we challenge pupils to become Egyptologists and record what they see on their visit to the SCC. Here are some of the drawings, recording the watercolour drawings of Ancient Egyptian grave markers in our collection.

We also have “squeezes” in our collection, which are pressed paper images of Ancient Egyptian engravings. Pupils use modelling dough to understand how an Egyptologist would squeeze wet paper into an engraving to create a record of how it looked. Wet paper takes too long to dry in our cold, wet climate, we’ve experimented!

Pupils also investigate the world of Ancient Egyptian medicine and the horrid things they mixed together to create them. They get a chance to make up their own recipes, drawing real hieroglyphs on to a recipe sheet.

One pupil decided to adapt the snake hieroglyph to that he could put snake skin in his medicine!

Our last Discovering Ancient Workshop of last week was attended by a very special guest.

Tatty Teddy came to visit with his P3 friends from Oyne Primary School. He is a very well travelled bear, with trips this year including a ski trip, France and now The Sir Duncan Rice Library!

If you would like to bring your class to the Special Collections Centre for a school workshop, email scc.learning@abdn.ac.uk or phone (01224) 273047 or (01224) 273048.

Posted by: Lynsey

Travel Journal: St Peter’s RC Primary School

Sarah and I don’t always stay inside the four walls of the lovely Sir Duncan Rice Library. Sometimes we wrap up warm (we are in the north of Scotland after all!) and go out and about. These “Travel Journal” posts will tell you where our learning adventures take us.

This week we were invited to St Peter’s RC Primary School to visit Primary 6 who we worked with in January. You can see the details of the project on their Guest Book post. When they were here at the SCC they explored the letters of the Laws family with us and began to get to know missionaries Robert and Maggie and their daughter Amy. Since then P6 have taken the project further in class and were keen to show us what they had been up to. They created art work using charcoal inspired by the Laws family. Some of the pupils drew some amazing portraits of Amy, which was interesting for Sarah and I to see as we have no photographs to show us what Amy looked like as a child.


Others drew scenes from Amy and her parents lives. 

The Journey of Amelia Laws by Filip

Hawk attacks chickens by Aleks

The parrot dead by Alexander

Amy’s parrot dead by Logan

As well as art work P6 used their creative writing skills to write entries for Amy’s diary and letters from Amy to her parents. Some of the diary entries described Amy’s feelings at being told she would have to leave Nyasaland (now Malawi) to live with her aunt in Edinburgh. The pupils really captured Amy’s feelings of fear and excitement. The letters described what Amy’s life in Edinburgh would have been like including bike rides with Aunt Mary, seeing Edinburgh Castle and experiencing snow for the first time. The pupils read some of the letters and diary entries aloud to us.

It was amazing how the pupils could put themselves in Amy’s shoes so well, especially since we don’t have any of Amy’s letters. It really brought her to life for us. 

We also got the chance to look at the display that P6 had made on their classroom wall about their visits to the SCC. We don’t often get the chance to see the pictures that the class take when they are with us or see what happens once they leave the library so we really enjoyed our trip. Thanks for having us Primary 6!

Posted by: Lynsey

Guest Book – International School of Aberdeen Preschool

On Friday we were visited by lots of young pupils from the International School of Aberdeen’s preschool class. They explored campus using our sculpture map and their very own “I spy…” sheet and visited The Sir Duncan Rice Library. Our current Waterlines exhibition focusses on the sculpture of the same name outside the Library so we used that as our starting point and talked about what a sculpture is. The pupils loved walking around Waterlines and seeing it from all angles. Next we looked at the newest of the University’s outdoor sculptures Evolutionary Loop 517.  We tried to work out what the sculptures were made of, and discussed which ones we liked and why. The classes’ opinion was split on both of the Library’s sculptures but all agreed that Evolutionary Loop 517 was particularly good to touch and climb on!

Next we escaped the cold by visiting the exhibition to see where the artists, Will Maclean and Marian Leven, got their inspiration from. Both were inspired by the sea and ships and so the pupils hunted in the gallery to find references to these.

Once they had had a good look at Will and Marian’s artwork the pupils were set the challenge of creating their very own sculptures for outside of the Library. They used recycled materials such as bottles, coffee stirrers, plastic containers and egg boxes to create amazing pieces of 3D art.
Here are the artists at work:

Before they left us for lunch the pupils finished off with a story in our comfy corner. It was called Little Tug by Stephen Savage and it had a lovely ending to end a very nice morning.

If you would like to bring your pre-school or nursery class to visit The Sir Duncan Rice Library please email us at scc.learning@abdn.ac.uk.

Posted by: Lynsey

Waterlines Family Fun – Calling all Sculptors

On Saturday we had our first Family Fun of 2013. It seemed overdue to us! The last one we had was way back in December and both Lynsey and I were really looking forward to another sociable afternoon of family art and craft.

Our theme on Saturday was sculpture, tying in with the current Waterlines sculpture exhibition in the gallery. “Waterlines” is the name of a sculpture created specially for the area outside the library by artists Will Maclean and Marian Leven. The sculpture incorporates themes of the sea, boats and also Pictish stones, which gives us a lot of good material for coming up with Family Fun ideas!

For this session the participants created their own fabulous sculptures for outside the library using recycled materials.

The children had to consider several things when making their sculptures, including how stability and how they would work “in situ” in front of the library building. Some of the children then drew their sculptures on acetate so they could see what their sculptures looked like in front of a photograph of the library.

It was also a trial run for our new quiet “comfy corner”, an area where younger children can go and play with sensory materials, books and puzzles. It was great to see some of the participants’ younger siblings making full use of the space and investigating our sensory play boxes. Older children also enjoyed playing in the corner once they had finished making their sculptures. We’ll be adding to the comfy corner resources over the next few months.

Our next Family Fun is on Saturday 16th March, 1-4pm. Drop in to the library and turn the events space into an artist’s studio. We’ll be making a variety of art inspired by the work of the two Waterlines artists. Hope to see you there!

Posted by: Sarah

Guest Book – the last few weeks

We’ve had lots of schools visiting us over the last few weeks, but with one half of the team being on holiday and the other half leading workshops our Guest Book posts have fallen by the wayside. So now that I have a school-free moment I’d like to make sure all of the lovely classes who have visited get a mention.

Jacobites: The Rout of Moy

This workshop was attended by:

• Fishermoss Primary School, P4/5
• Broomhill Primary School, P5
• Hazlehead Primary School, P6

This workshop allows pupils to bring the Jacobites and Hanoverians to life in our Learning Room. Items from the archives (including a letter written by Charles Edward Stuart) are examined before the class listen to The Rout of Moy, a story inspired by the collection and real historical events. Through games and drama activities the pupils then tell the story themselves. Have a look at some of the pictures from last week’s workshops and see if you can guess what’s going on.

Discovering Ancient Egypt

This workshop was attended by:

• St Cyrus Primary School, P3
• Fishermoss Primary School, P3
• Drumoak Primary School, P3/4
• Glass Primary School, P1-4
• Glass Primary School, P5-7

Another popular workshop looks at Victorian Egyptologists’ records in the Special Collections. Pupils are asked to solve a problem: What would you do if you found an amazing artefact but it was too big to bring home? Oh and you don’t have a digital camera! Our Egyptologists, George Tomlinson and Ellen Pollard, used drawings, squeezes and writing to do this and we look at the original archives to explore their methods before the pupils tested them out for themselves .
Ellen’s notebooks are a fascinating record of the hieroglyphs she saw and translated on her travels around Egypt, including recipes for Ancient Egyptian medicines. The pupils use this as inspiration for their own recipes including some horrid ingredients like snake, ox and blood.
Unfortunately I didn’t manage to catch the rest of the action (the down side of running workshops on your own) but all the classes were great fun to have in the Learning Room. Thanks to Glass Primary Schools’ P1-4 for being our first ever Primary 1′s. We had great fun making recipes together and I hope they use their recipe cards to make even more revolting recipes back at school!

Posted by: Lynsey

Collections Highlight: The Librarian’s Room Collection

Sarah and Lynsey interview Laura Castle, Collections Care Assistant at the Special Collections Centre

Tell us about what you do at the Special Collections Centre (SCC).

I’m the Collections Care Assistant for the SCC.  That means that I’m a kind of caretaker for the collections. I have a very varied job and I do lots of different tasks during the week. I go out and do surveys of potential collections, to assess what can be brought in to the SCC. I also make sure our stores are kept clean by doing regular deep cleans. This is part of the Integrated Pest Management programme and it ensures that our stores are not an environment where insects or pests would want to come and live. They are the types of things that would damage the collections so we don’t want them here.

My job is mainly preservation rather than conservation. Preservation is making sure that our collection is housed correctly, from the environment in the stores to ensuring that the way the items are stored on the shelves isn’t damaging them.  If an archive is in a folder made of acidic paper that can damage the material inside so I’ll change it to a new folder that is acid free. If papers have been held together with a rusty paper-clip I remove it and clean the surface of the document to take away rust stains. I cleaned a whole section of the collection when I was a volunteer many years ago.

Sometimes if an item is damaged I will put it in a melinex sleeve, made of a special kind of plastic. This means that the item is able to be held and used for access without it getting more damaged.

I do a lot of lone working but I also work with the rest the Conservation department. I learn new things everyday from my Conservation colleagues. Brannah, our book conservator, can teach me on one day how to put things in melinex sleeves and show me how to make a custom box for things that can’t go in the sleeves.  And then the next day she could be teaching me how to use special kinds of pastes and paper to stick down parts of books which are coming off.

Conservators can repair items which have been damaged, but they are also concerned with the preservation side of things. After all there is no point in fixing something and then shoving it back in the same acidic folder.

As well as taking care of the collection I am also a first aider, a health and safety adviser and a work station assessor. I do a lot of volunteer introductions as well. I’m also a qualified archivist.

What do you like most about your job?

I like the variety of my job. One day I’ll be looking at graphs to monitor the environment in the stores and then the next day I’ll be wrapping up books for treatment.

Tell us about one your favourite items in the collection.

I have been delving into the collections since I started volunteering in 2005 or 2006, so I have many favourite items. I have been a little ferret in this place! I’ve worked on plans, glass plate negatives, rare books, letter collections, oral history, basically every type of archive material. Therefore it was very difficult to try and make a short list, never mind choose one favourite item. In the end I have chosen the Lib R Collection as my favourite collection because it reflects my job in its variety.

Lib R is short for the Librarian’s Room. Nowadays the University of Aberdeen has many libraries, including The Sir Duncan Rice Library, but until 1860 the University only had one library, King’s College Library. There was only one librarian and no archivists until the 1970s, so the librarian had to deal with a vast range of both books and archives. Certain books ended up in the librarian’s own special room and this formed the Lib R collection. It is still added to today, although they tend to be modern limited editions and the output of private presses.

From this varied collection, which would you say is your favourite item?

Out of them all I chose a photograph album, Lib R f 779 IND vol 2. It is volume 2 of a collection of photograph albums containing photographs from lots of different people going to different countries including China, East Africa and Canada in the 1900′s. This is the India and Ceylon volume and I chose it because I did my undergraduate dissertation on mixed race children in India in relation to the East India Company.

For people of the early 1900’s the photographs in the albums showed what life was like in these countries. You can see normal life (although slightly staged for the photographer), different types of buildings, weddings, fashion, festivals and lots more.

You can see people from different levels of the caste system, from royalty of India to ethnic minorities. There are people in what look like tribal settings with nose plugs. That is a brilliant picture; they don’t look that intrigued by the fact that they’re having their picture taken. And there is a Tibetan woman, so some of the photographers must have travelled quite far north in India.

Do we know who took the pictures?

There seem to be two main photographers; Skene & Co. and Bourne & Shepherd. However the photographs are so wide spread that I think this could be like modern photograph collections where you’ve got different photographers and they’ll just put their photographs together into one album.

What do you like most about the album?

I like the humanity of it. I like the fact that they’re not ignoring different social groups, you’ve got minstrels so to speak, you’ve got warriors and washermen, but then on the next page you’ve got a market place, and then a modern building that to me looks like it could be in the West Indies.

I blame my dad for my interest in photographs. Both my granddads used to take lots of photographs, and now my dad is midway through digitising 200 of our family photographs!

Do you have a favourite page in the album?

I probably like the photographs of women the most, the ones that are almost like really early fashion shots. I almost did my dissertation on how the East India Company with its big trade routes across India changed British fashion over the years, including the introduction of pyjamas.

This lady is probably my favourite of them all. I like the fact that’s it’s quite obviously not airbrushed. There’s an occasional hair out of place, she’s got a natural beauty.  The fact they haven’t airbrushed out any of her imperfections makes her look more beautiful to me.

There is a University stamp on this page. This used to be done so that if someone tried to steal an item we would know it’s ours. Usually you’d find these stamps at the front and maybe in the middle, but this isn’t the middle of the book. The other ladies don’t have stamps, so the librarian who did this must have thought she was very beautiful too. That is my interpretation anyway.

Would you stamp it nowadays?

No, we wouldn’t. An interesting thing about the collection is that you can see which period an item came from by what the librarians have done with it, as cataloguing techniques have changed over the years. Some older ones will have little stickers on the outside which make me cringe because the glue can damage the book if the label is peeled off. Some will have the little tags on the top attached with string, and if the string is too thick and too near to the books spine it can damage it. Some will just have the catalogue number written in pencil in the inside cover, while a lot of the ones which are bequests and gifted items have bookplates on them. I’ve seen so many interesting bookplates while cleaning.

Are you more interested in photographs of people than of scenes?

Not really because there’s always somebody in the photographs. If you’re looking at one of the George Washington Wilson photographs online, zoom in and you’ll probably see somebody going about their day-to-day life in the background. They’ll be going to work, or taking their horse to market, or even having a snooze! There’s a great one in the Harbour Board Collection where they’ve taken a picture and there’s somebody quite obviously having a snooze against a lamp post further down.

The pages look warped; has the album got damp at some point in the past?

No, sometimes the pages just warp because the glue between the two media (the paper pages and the photograph paper) are very different. It’s quite common in albums. You can see from the outer board that there’s been no water damage to it, it’s just warps unfortunately. This also means that the wobbles in the pages create little pockets of space, and this causes dark patches and foxing. These albums used to be stored quite low down on the shelf so fibres from people, skin and generally dust would get in the pockets.

There’s foxing on the inside cover which is quite common. Foxing is discoloration which some people occasionally try to hide. I don’t like the idea of that because it just comes back and I personally like that aging effect.

Does foxing just occur with age or is it induced by something?

I’ve done a little research into it last year and they still can’t work out why it does it. Even scientists can’t agree on why foxing happens. I think it’s just a bit like wrinkles!

Thanks Laura, for a fascinating look into the amazing Lib R collection.

Laura’s job lets her see all sorts of amazing things in our Rare Book and Archive collections. If you would like to find out what sort of collections we hold why not take a look at our webpages. And if you are interested in travel photography, illustration and writing then keep an eye out for updates on our next exhibition opening in the summer term.

Posted by: Sarah and Lynsey