National Library of Scotland - military resources

Have I mentioned lately what an extremely useful resource for military historians, the National Library of Scotland has become?

For a start, the material has been digitised to a high quality specification from original material held at the National Library. The image above is taken from Hart's Annual Army List for 1913 and there are many such volumes which can be easily accessed. Here' a list of Army Lists from 1839 to 1915, and clicking on any of the links on this page opens up further links. There are also separate sections for the Royal Navy 1913-1940 and the Royal Air Force 1919-1945.

The National Library of Scotland's War section can be accessed by clicking on the link. This then opens up a number of different categories of which the Army Lists (noted above), Rolls of Honour and military maps are arguably the most interesting.  The military maps include First World War trench maps 1915-1918 and maps of Belgium from the Second World War.

Best of all is that this is a free resource, digitised by the National Library of Scotland and made freely available to a worldwide audience.

Army Lists

This is probably a case of preaching to the converted, but Army Lists can be incredibly useful in tracing an army officer's career, and they're also easily available these days. There are a number of vendors selling bundles of volumes on eBay (from around £7) and you can also download digital images from The Internet Archive. I downloaded the Army List for 1909 just the other day. I had a copy of this on my desk at work and it took about five inches of desk space (and was also quite unwieldy to use). Now, it's a 155mb file on my desktop and easily searchable within a few seconds.