ABSTRACT
Robin Alston's own major contribution to the field, in the shape of a web-mounted database of libraries up to 1850, was started in 1991 and was to be used by many researchers, as was his handlist of manuscript catalogues in the British Library. Alston also initiated a series of postgraduate library history seminars at the University of London in 1998, setting the subject in the context of other historical research. The significance of libraries, particularly monastic libraries, in the culture of the Middle Ages has long been recognized, and scholarly effort has been recognized more widely in this field, than for later library history. The publication of major source material in the Corpus of British medieval library catalogues under the auspices of the British Academy and the British Library, which began in 1990 with K. W. Humphreys on the friars' libraries, continued apace. The British public library has always been a prominent feature in these reviews of library history writing.
