My research in library history has focused on the nineteenth-century histories of national libraries, libraries in the ancient world, and the intersections between libraries and cultural mythologies.
My academic publications on these subjects include:
- ‘Did Aristotle invent library classification?’, Libraries: Culture, History, and Society, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Fall 2022). URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/342559 [Peer-reviewed article]
- ‘The collections of John Addenbrooke (1690–1718)’, Libraries of Curiosities (Gdańsk: Polska Akademia Nauk / Biblioteka Gdańska, 2022) [Conference proceedings, forthcoming]
- ‘“Seeing sights that don’t exist” – Karl Marx in the British Museum Round Reading Room’, Journal of Library and Information History, Vol. 33, No. 2 (May 2017) DOI: 10.1080/17583489.2017.1298892 [Peer-reviewed article]
- ‘The Library of Alexandria as myth and metaphor’, What Do We Lose When We Lose a Library, pp. 69-75 (Leuven University Press, 2016). ISBN: 9789461651990 [Conference proceedings]
- ‘“The guttural sorrow of the refugees” – Constance Garnett and Felix Volkhovsky in the British Museum’, Материалы X Международного Семинара Переводчиков (Музей-усадьба Л.Н. Толстого “Ясная Поляна”, 2016). URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/252929 [Conference proceedings]
- ‘Library of Congress Classification: Teddy Roosevelt’s world in numbers?’, Cataloging and Classification Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 4 (May 2012). DOI: 10.1080/01639374.2012.658989 [Peer-reviewed article]
Reviews, and more general writings, include:
- ‘The Revolutionary in Disguise: Lenin and Mao as Library Workers,’ Library and Information History Group Newsletter, Series 3, no. 49 (Winter, 2021/22)
- Review of: Libraries and the reading public in twentieth-century America, Times Literary Supplement, 6 June 2014
- Review of: Paper knowledge: Toward a media history of documents, Times Higher Education, 27 February 2014
- Review of: Roomscape: Women writers in the British Museum from George Eliot to Virginia Woolf, Times Higher Education, 18 July 2013
- Review of: Information history in the modern world, Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, Vol. 43, No. 4 (Dec. 2011)
- ‘Marx, Pandora and the tower of porn’, Times Higher Education, 9 June 2011
- ‘Charles Darwin – Programme 1’, In Our Time Special, broadcast BBC Radio 4, 5 January 2009
colinhiggins.net 