From billion-year-old rocks to forgotten £50 notes

Linda Barclay Isles

Wednesday 10 December 2025

If you think you know what goes on in our Libraries and Museums, think again. Behind every shelf, database, specimen drawer and mysterious parcel is a team of 118 people (66 full-time and 52 part-time) quietly making the impossible happen for teaching, research and the thousands of students and staff who rely on them every day.

Surprising stats

• The University currently provides access to an incredible 75,998 journals
• After the scientific heavyweights Nature and Nature Communications, the third most-used title is…Vogue (strike a pose)
• Items in the University’s research repository have been downloaded over 1.5 million times in the last year (IRUS combined stats for DSpace and Portal).
• Our research collaborations span the globe, with the Pure Portal mapping links from Aberdeen to everywhere from Argentina to Australia.
• The oldest item in our collections is a rock – the Acasta Gneiss from Canada, clocking in at around 3.5 billion years old, followed by relative youngster the Lewisian Gneiss, between 1 and 3 billion years depending on the sample.

In short: Libraries and Museums are a lot more than books. But, speaking of books, have you ever wondered what the University’s most-borrowed books are?

All-time top borrowed (print only):

1. Advanced Macroeconomics, David Romer – 2,821 checkouts
2. Art in Theory, 1815–1900, eds. Harrison, Wood & Gaiger – 2,420 checkouts
3. Earth’s Climate: Past and Future, William F. Ruddiman – 2,406 checkouts

This year’s top titles (2025, print only):

1. International Relations Theories, Dunne, Kurki, & Smith – 48 checkouts
2. Orientalism, Edward Said – 46 checkouts
3. The Globalization of World Politics, Baylis and Smith – 42 checkouts

If you need it, they can (probably) find it

When academics need something, the team tries to find it, no matter how unusual the request. They’ve sourced issues of the Spiderman comic, the musical scores of The Beatles, and the complete works of Tintin, but the prize for most adventurous acquisition goes to the colleague who had to track down a film by Eriberto Gualinga, a filmmaker living in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

After multiple attempts, she finally reached him by sliding into his Instagram DMs, arranged a purchase of Helena Sarayaku Manta, and worked with Finance to create an invoice for an address with no street name, no house number, and no postal code.

Mission impossible? Not for this team.

We quizzed some of the team on their favourite items in the collections, and they include a full run of French Elle magazines (1950–1982) and a copy of Winnie the Pooh in Russian.

Working in a library long enough guarantees a few stories – one colleague once opened a random book and discovered a prawn used as a bookmark. Another was shelving books when a crisp £50 note fluttered out – the first time he had ever seen one. He tracked down the borrower – an international student whose visiting parents had given her cash which she’d used as a bookmark and forgotten about it. As you do with fifties.

Sometimes the purchasing team are sent things they haven’t ordered. This includes, but is not limited to, some very expensive Bobby Brown foundation, a pair of tights, magnets, vaping flavours, a French travel guide from 1993, some Spanish sleeping pills…and several boxes of Yorkshire tea.

Who among us can honestly say they haven’t accidentally sent tights or tea to a university library?

With grateful thanks to everyone who contributed to this feature, and to everyone in Libraries and Museums for their hard work.