National Library of Scotland chief on sharing our treasures with the world

It’s a body of knowledge that gives a taste of the world-class collections he’s been guarding and growing at the National Library of Scotland (NLS) for the past seven years as a transformation programme has made it bigger and more accessible than ever.

The Edinburgh institution is the largest library in Scotland and a major European research site.

Since 2015 it has beaten international rivals to acquire antique treasures, opened its Moving Image Archive in Glasgow’s historic Kelvin Hall and undertaken an ambitious digital shift that’s helped readers all over the country and the world get their eyes on popular and significant works.

Ian Rankin’s personal archive is now in NLS hands, as is the 1509 Aberdeen Breviary – the country’s first printed work – and a working manuscript of Lord Byron’s Don Juan.

Scally recalls that “jaws dropped at the New York Public Library, the British Library, all over the world” when NLS acquired that piece with private backing. “That was sweet,” he says.

“Byron was educated in Aberdeen, he was up there for ages and ages, so he’s ours anyway.”

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of items have been put online for free in a move that’s seen traffic to the NLS website reach almost seven million annual visitors and kept usage high during the pandemic, with popular social media accounts sharing Scots words and quotes from Ursula K Le Guin alongside morning weather reports.

This week Scally revealed he’ll retire in October, a decision which he says has left him with “mixed emotions”.

NLS collections run to 26 million items from new novels to old maps, prison newspapers and 1990s Gaelic TV shows, King Charles I’s personal prayer book and John Byrne’s giant pop-up set for The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil.

Scally, who attended the same Paisley secondary school as Byrne, says his route to becoming National Librarian began with Catcher in the Rye, given to him by an English teacher “with a sense of humour”.

“I was sitting with my head in my hands one day and she said, ‘John, what’s wrong?’” he remembers. “I said ‘they’re all dead – Tennyson, Shakespeare, everybody that you teach us, they’re all dead. Is nobody alive that writes?’

“The next day she came in and gave me Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. It totally blew me away. I took it in after the weekend and gave her it back, and I was completely emotional about it, and she said ‘that’s not my book any more, it’s yours’. It was a turning point, having a teacher who believed in me.”

It was a far cry from the report written by another teacher, who told Scally’s parents that “John will eventually realise that he’s quite bright but it’s going to take him a while”. It was an assessment he was determined to disprove and led to history studies at Cambridge and the publication of works on Robert Louis Stevenson’s illustrators, the pre-1707 Scottish Parliament and the British Civil Wars of the 1640s.

It’s an impressive list, but Scally – the only brother to seven sisters – says his mum wasn’t really impressed until he got the NLS job. When he visited her to break the news, she put Coronation Street on pause, telling him “that sounds like a big deal”.

Big is what Scally’s tenure as National Librarian has been all about – extensive change, broad outreach, large investment. He convinced the Scottish Government to fund the digital programme and says the support of Fiona Hyslop and John Swinney has been “stupendous”.

“I told them, ‘you give us money for the building, but we have got a digital library as well. We’ll build a brilliant digital library for Scotland’.

READ MORE: Scotland’s national library collection to go online

“I inherited a very good physical library, brilliant collections. But I also inherited a lumpy digital library that had brought in a lot of stuff but hadn’t really committed to it. What it didn’t have was parity of esteem for both those concepts, physical and digital.

“Before I came in, you could count the digitised items on your digits,” he says, holding his fingers aloft. “We have digitised 200,000 items in a year.”

Scally is certain that work has helped many during the pandemic, from pupils undertaking online lessons to readers seeking escapism.

Though much was set in motion before March, the “rapidity of the pivot” into lockdown left Scally surviving on a few hours sleep each night as plans were drawn and redrawn. “It’s one of the biggest challenges we’ve ever had to consider. We had to really, really think quickly.

“At the end there was a sense of relief that the staff were safe and the collections were safe.”

Despite announcing his retirement, Scally’s passion for NLS is undimmed. He’s proud of the collections, but says it’s never been his library. “It’s your library, it’s Scotland’s library, I’m just the librarian,” he says. “It’s a heritage asset. It’s something the public own.”

He has a particular connection to special volumes like the Bannatyne Manuscript of medieval flytings, love poems and religious verse, but there’s a form of writing Scally has stamped out at NLS, and was glad to see the back of – corporate language.

READ MORE: Latin link shows how Scottish poets looked to Europe rather than England

“When libraries get a bit wobbly they start talking in a very corporate way, they actually start calling the reader a customer,” he says. “I’m not a customer when I go into a library, I’m a reader.

“You do that and it starts feeling like a supermarket or a McDonald’s, you lose your heart and soul. It’s dehumanising.

“On my first day in the job, I walked in and I couldn’t find my office. I asked and somebody said, ‘there it is’. Above the door there was a sign saying ‘corporate support unit’. Where was the librarian’s office? The first thing I did was say, ‘take that down’.

“You’ve got beauty on every page, somebody put their heart on the page and you look at it through this corporate speak of ingest of content and performance indicators?

“I talk about the library as the guardian of the published and recorded memory of Scotland.”