Contacting us
This page provides details of the ways you can contact us if you have an enquiry. If you wish to find material in our collections and order it for consultation, the quickest way of doing this is to search the main catalogue and use the direct ordering system there.
By email:
If you have an enquiry or would like to offer us a potential acquisition, please use the Rare Books email address, rarebooks@nls.uk, which is checked daily Monday-Friday. You may send emails to individual staff members as listed below, but please bear in mind that such emails may not be read immediately if the individual staff member is absent.
By telephone:
0131 623 3899 for enquiries concerning pre-orders of material, reprographic requests or permission to reproduce material from the collections.
0131 623 3893 for all other enquiries.
By letter:
Write to us at: Rare Book Collections, National Library of Scotland, George IV Bridge, Edinburgh EH1 1EW.
Rare Book Collections staff: Responsibilities and interests
Rare Book Curators have responsibility for broad areas of the rare book collections, and also have specific areas of professional and subject expertise. Our team also includes some staff working on special projects.
Helen Vincent — Head of Rare Books, Maps and Music
Email: h.vincent@nls.uk
- Specialist areas include: History of the Book; women's writing.
Rare Books Curators
Robert L Betteridge — Eighteenth-Century Printed Collections Curator
Email: r.l.betteridge@nls.uk
- Specialist areas include: Robert Burns; Jacobites; ESTC; Library history; provenance research
Anette Hagan — Early Printed Collections to 1700 Curator
Email: a.hagan@nls.uk
- Specialist areas include: Gaelic; Scots language; chapbooks; Scottish Book Trade Index; National Bibliography of Scotland, including Early Scottish Books Online (Aldis Updated)
Graham Hogg — Nineteenth-Century and Photographic Collections Curator
Email: g.hogg@nls.uk
- Specialist areas include: Sir Walter Scott; Crawford Collections
James Mitchell — Rare Books Curator
Email: james.mitchell@nls.uk
- Specialist areas include: Rare materials cataloguing; art; music; miniature books; children's books; ICAS and Moir collections; Robert Louis Stevenson
Blake Milteer — MacKinnon Collection Curator (based at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery)
Email: b.milteer@nls.uk or BMilteer@nationalgalleries.org
- The MacKinnon Collection of Scottish photographs is owned jointly by the National Galleries of Scotland and the National Library of Scotland, and Blake Milteer works out of both institutions.