Sarah's Adventures to London and Other Places: Second Day in Edinburgh and Edinburgh Central Library

On Wednesday, July 15, 2015 the day started off at 8:30am with the class meeting in front of the cafeteria to head to the National Library of Scotland to look at the John Murray Archive exhibit. However, once we got there at 9am the exhibit did not open up until 10am. But Dr. Welsh talked to someone in charge about how we are a Library and Information Science postgraduate class and could not stay until 10am because we had an appointment to get to at that time. The nice man opened the exhibit early for us to view. The exhibit was very nice. It was in a dark room and the items were grouped together in floor to ceiling cylinders with touch screens in front of them. When you touched the screens you can click on an item and it wil tell you more about the item and it will put a spotlight on the item. So it makes sense that the room is dark just so that it can highlight certain items more easily.

After we looked at the exhibit, we walked across the street to go to Edinburgh Central Library. The library is a lending library for the city. It was opened on June 9, 1890 as a Carnegie Library. This year they celebrate 125 years of being opened.

Once we got to the library, we had a little time before we had to meet for our tour so we sang whispered Happy Birthday to Debbie because her birthday is this upcoming Sunday and we won't be together. After that, we went to the George Washington Brown meeting room to talk about what we will be doing at the library: tours and 3 talks from professionals at the library.

For our tours, we were split in to three groups and were led to different areas of the library so that we could all hear and see the library while not running in to each other. The places we saw in the library on my tour are: the children's library, the central lending library, we talked about the art and design library, reference, the mezzanine which is where the music collection, video collection, teen area, the Edinburgh and Scotland collections, and one acoustic pod for groups.

Once the tour was over, we made it back to the meeting room where we were given coffee or tea for our three talks. The first talk was by Karen O'Brien called "Never Too Old" about the history of the library, acquisitions, and some of the items in their collections. The second talk was by Sarah Forteath about some of the outreach programs that the library hosts and about how to get more users in to the library. The last talk was by Alison Stoddart about about the digital side of the library. All three of the talks were interesting and informative. This visit was by far one of my favorites because the set up of our visit was different then our other tours.

One of the facts that I learned about the library on my tour is that the library is two buildings that were merged together in the 1930s when they acquired the building next door.

After our visit, we headed down the street to the Elephant House were J.K. Rowling wrote Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Unfortunately, some of us did not get to eat there because it was really crowded.

Some of us went down the street to Deacon Brodies Tavern to have lunch. After that some of us split up and went to go shopping on the Royal Mile. After our shopping, we headed back to the dorm to get ready to hike up to Arthur's Seat. We met up in front of the cafeteria and made our way to the mountain. Once we got to the bottom of the mountain, I looked up at what I had to climb and started to have an asthma attack just looking at it. So I decided to head back to the dorm to calm down and to start packing for tomorrow. However, before I went back to the dorm I was able to get this picture of the mountain.