Posts by Sarah Colborne
Reading the correspondence of the Duchess of Portland
May 18, 2023
This is a guest blog by Arts Faculty Placement student Nabiha Iqbal, who in 2023, worked on cataloguing the papers of Dorothy Bentinck, Duchess of Portland (1750-1794). I was granted the unique opportunity to revisit the lives of the noble men and women of 18th century England through their primary means of communication: letters. Each …
Documenting the pandemic and beyond: website captures for the University Archives available to view
April 17, 2023
This is a post by Laura Peaurt, Digital Preservation Officer and Sarah Colborne, Archivist (Collections). Capture and Preservation In a previous blog we discussed using Preservica, our digital preservation platform, to successfully capture websites and social media for the archive. This is known as web archiving. The tools provided by the platform allow us to …
The Ken Coates collection – the coal mining industry and its decline in Nottinghamshire
December 14, 2022
This is a guest blog post by Law student Ceyhan Ballioglu, who undertook a placement with Manuscripts and Special Collection in 2022. During the Autumn semester of my second year at the University of Nottingham, I had the opportunity to volunteer at the Manuscripts and Special Collections Department. Here, I was given the chance to …
Advocates for animal welfare
December 1, 2022
Work has just finished on an 18-month project to catalogue papers held by Manuscripts and Special Collections which chart the progress made in promoting the concept of the Three Rs, the guiding principles of Reduction, Replacement and Refinement, in regards to the use of animals in scientific research. The work was made possible by a …
Around with William Parsons
September 22, 2022
This is a guest post by Dr David Beckingham, Associate Professor in Cultural and Historical Geography at the University of Nottingham and curator of the exhibition ‘Last Orders: stories of alcohol and abstinence in the East Midlands’. The task of putting together this exhibition was enabled by the cataloguing work of colleagues and volunteers at …
Matt Marks archive collection: ‘The Bridge’ and how it came to be
July 21, 2022
This is a guest post by Aldea Toth, 2nd year English undergraduate at UoN who completed a student placement working on the archive of Matt Marks. When I was volunteering at the Manuscripts and Special Collections Department, I had the pleasure of archiving the works of the late Matt Marks, who was once a student …
Remote volunteering: tackling transcriptions
July 11, 2022
This is a guest post by Manuscripts and Special Collections volunteer, Emily Williams, who worked with digitised versions of analogue recordings for a remote placement devised especially for providing careers experience when we were unable to host volunteers in our reading room. Commencing in the summer of 2020, I was given the opportunity to complete …
Last Orders at the Weston Gallery
June 7, 2022
This is a guest post by Dr David Beckingham, co-curator of the Last Orders exhibition, which opens at the Weston Gallery, Lakeside Arts in June. Last Orders examines cultures of alcohol consumption and abstinence in the East Midlands, with a particular focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ubiquitous though pubs and drink may have …
Feminist Archive East Midlands at the University of Nottingham
February 25, 2022
A team of volunteers and former members of the Nottingham Women’s Liberation Group have been working with Manuscripts and Special Collections at the University of Nottingham to create a feminist archive for the East Midlands. The archive consists of material compiled by women involved in various strands of activism between the 1960s and 1990s, …
Digital Collecting for the University Archives
May 6, 2020
Manuscripts and Special Collections may be working from home but we’re still busy developing and implementing our new digital preservation system, Preservica. Preservica helps us to manage and preserve our existing born-digital collections as well as collect official university records for the archive in digital formats such as Microsoft Office files (such as meeting minutes), emails, video and photographs. …
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