Yoonha Hwang

About Yoonha’s Research:

This doctoral project will examine the ways in which the knowledge-organization practices of a historical library affect the development of the institution and manifest discourses of power. In particular, it will explore how bibliographic descriptions ascribe cultural value and historical significance to items in a historical collection. The project’s case study, the Signet Library, is notably under-studied when compared to the other major libraries in Edinburgh: the last substantial account was by George Hodge Ballantyne in 1979. It thus provides a novel opportunity to consider the cultural politics of an evolving library collection. The Signet Library’s relationship with the Society of Writers to His Majesty’s Signet additionally allows this project to further understand catalogue records as politically meaningful documents. This relationship between the two entities grants the organising practices and ideological structures of the Signet Library a distinctive, potent role in the historical evolution of Scottish professional and bibliographical culture.

The core of the project is a detailed, historiographical analysis of a series of key catalogues punctuating the collection’s development. This approach will allow for an institutional book history of the Signet Library, focusing on a period spanning from 1820, when Macvey Napier’s work as Librarian of the Signet Library established the basis for the library’s international reputation, to the deaccessioning of parts of the collection in the twentieth century, through a historiographical analysis of five key material items in the library’s archival record as the primary body of evidence to be examined.