Session Papers capture transatlantic lives in an era of dramatic change. At the biannual meeting of the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, SCOS's co-directors joined their friends and colleagues from the Centre for Research Collections (CRC) at the University of Edinburgh and the Edinburgh Law School to discuss the challenges of making Session Papers more accessible and what they have to tell us about the people who appeared before the Court of Session.
Jim Ambuske, Randi Flaherty, and Loren Moulds of SCOS, along with Roger Norman of the CRC and Dr. Chloë Kennedy of the Law School presented "Digitizing the Enlightenment and the Law: Reconstructing Enlightenment Identities in the British Atlantic World through the Records of Scotland's Court of Session" to a full auditorium featuring audience members from institutions around the world.
Ambuske kicked off the program by providing a brief history of the UVA Law Library's project and Session Papers in general before turning the floor over to Norman for an overview of the Session Papers in Edinburgh libraries and an explanation of the CRC's recent digitization efforts. Moulds talked about the challenges of creating metadata architecture to describe and interpret Session Papers, while Flaherty highlighted the presence of enslaved people in these records and the opportunity they hold for recovering their voices. Kennedy concluded the panel by describing the implications of Session Papers for her work on identity deception and fraud in the nineteenth century.
After the panel, the team was fortunate to speak with representatives from the Georgian Papers Programme, the Huntington Library, and many others about similar digital challenges and possible future areas of collaboration.
