1893 map of Shetland, from Cassell’s Gazetteer of Great Britain and Ireland; Published by Cassell and Company Limited, London.
One of the aims of our current project is to establish the cost and workflow requirements for creating a complete virtual collection of the County Surveys. Many of the surveys are already available in various online archives but discovering them is not as easy as it could be and quality and accessibility remain quite variable. In the longer term, we hope to aggregate high quality full-text files that we can use for research-led text mining.  In order to establish the projected costs and labour involved in such a project, as part of the pilot we plan to identify one or two rare surveys and digitise them according to current best practices, documenting this process for ourselves and others. Clearly, as funds are limited, it makes sense to focus on volumes that are not already available in digital form and which are rare even in print.
One such candidate is the General view of the Agriculture of the Shetland Islands by John Shirreff which was published in Edinburgh by Constable & Co in 1814. This is a volume, according to one early 19th Century reviewer, which was of a peculiarly special interest to contemporary readers for it describes “a remote part of the British dominions, with which many readers are perhaps as little acquainted as with the Islands in the South Sea; and they exhibit a state of Society very different in several respects from that which prevails in the other provinces of Britain.â€� Indeed, comparing Orkney and Shetland to the wilds of the American frontier, he suggests the inhabitants of these northern islands belong to a different, less civilised time and “bring into view a stage in the progress of improvement at which the inhabitants of the South has arrived some centuries ago, and which had been long since passed over by the people of almost every other part of the Island.â€� (The Farmer’s Magazine 15 (Aug 1814): 343) The exoticism, snobbery and geo-political bias of these remarks seems almost comical today, but they suggest that the contents of Shetland survey may be of particular importance to historians given the apparently substantial differences from more ‘advanced’ mainland practices.  Happily we will all be able to judge for ourselves soon, because a print copy of the Shetland survey is held here in Edinburgh at the Royal Botanic Gardens and they have kindly agreed to allow its digitisation: we’ll post about this process once it gets underway.”