Books, Cooks, Tides, Steamers, and Dress! or Enquiries at the Caird Library

Important information for visitors

Until summer 2025, there is a new visitor route at the National Maritime Museum while we carry out essential improvements to the Museum's roof. Most galleries will still be open as normal, and special exhibitions are currently free for all visitors. However, the Great Map and AHOY! will be closed for the duration of the works. Find out more.

Essential Information

Location	National Maritime Museum

11 Feb 2013

Hi there! My name is Nabila and I joined the Caird Library’s team as a Library Assistant in June 2012. These past seven months have flown by! I have been a library assistant since 2005 working in public libraries during my A-levels and a government library after graduating, so it is a welcome change to be in specialist library. I love working in libraries because I enjoy helping people find the information they are looking for. We have some incredible enquiries that range from family history research to questions about tides. We recently had a request for an authentic signature of Captain Cook (Click here to see AGC/C/15 : click on the second letter and scroll down).

I enjoy answering enquiries related to the Lloyd’s Maritime Collection. For example, when a reader asked us for the year a steamer was built and the vessel’s dimensions, knowing only her official number and that she sailed sometime in the 1950s. I had to search the Lloyd’s Register of Shipping of three different years (1952, 1955 and 1958) to find the ship by the correct official number. Still produced today, Lloyd’s Register is published annually and the Library’s collection dates back as far as 1764. It’s ideal for looking up basic facts such as where and when a vessel was built, who built it, who owned it and details of its hull, rig, construction and any engines.

I must confess I am no expert in maritime history, but I have learnt a lot in the short time I have been here! Our collections of books and manuscripts are, to say the least, vast and they provide an incredible insight in our history. It is exciting to be working closely with the acquisition and cataloguing of books that are added to this incredible collection. I help process new books and prepare them to be seen in the Library. For example, I have been working on cataloguing pamphlets and books from our offsite stores and have dealt with 230 of them so far. Look out for a forth coming post on the latest Library acquisitions, but in the meantime, here are some of my favourites so far:

Dickens, Gerald, The dress of the British sailor (HMSO, 1957), 355.14(42), Library ID: PBD2074
Greenhill, Basil, James Cook : the opening of the Pacific (HMSO for NMM, 1970), 92COOK:910.4(93/96)"1768/1780", Library ID: PBH5181
Carr, Frank George Griffith, Maritime Greenwich (Pitkin Pictorials, 1974), 914.216(26), Library ID: PBH5219

So if you see any of our new books be certain that I helped in getting it ready for you! Have a look in our Library catalogue and look out for the new books in the link at the top of the page. And don't forget you can search the Archive catalogue for original manuscript records, like the Cook letter above!

Nabila (Library Assistant)