Posts by Sarah Colborne
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. …
Carry on Collecting: Tri Campus contemporary collecting during lockdown
April 27, 2020
Manuscripts and Special Collections (MSC) may be WFH and unable to access the collections in our manuscripts store, but we’re still busy improving our catalogues, promoting our resources, and we’re also still busy sourcing material to add to our archives. The University’s new digital preservation system allows us to manage and preserve digital items such …
Putting it in Perspective
March 4, 2020
Guest post by Chloé Havez (3rd year Politics & International Relations undergraduate student) The title of a 1992 newspaper clipping on Coates’ criticism of the European Parliament quarrelling over where the European Environment Agency should have been built during the alarmist trend of ozone depletion is of unfortunate relevance today thirty years on, and could …
Digital preservation of Students’ Union materials
November 13, 2019
As a collections archivist with Manuscripts and Special Collections (MSC), I work closely with people who donate their materials to the University to ensure that the right material is preserved. At the University we have an ongoing relationship with services and departments who have recognised the importance of passing records to the archive. We already …
Exhibition Fully Fashioned: Archival Remnants of the Textile Trade
September 24, 2019
Manuscripts and Special Collections’ latest exhibition entitled Fully Fashioned: Archival Remnants of the Textile Trade was officially opened by Professor Andy Long, Provost and Deputy Vice-Chancellor. The exhibition showcases the University of Nottingham’s business archives relating to lace and hosiery. Both of these industries were a major source of employment in the East Midlands and …
War work in the water archives
May 8, 2019
This is a guest post by Geography student placement Natalia O’Cleirigh The University of Nottingham Manuscripts and Special Collections holds a collection of resources from the River Trent Catchment Board. I was tasked with cataloguing a section of the archive as part of my placement which focused on the Engineers’ files. The organisation was responsible …
Revisiting the Dark Side; the archive of the University of Nottingham Gothic Society
March 12, 2019
A guest post by Anja Rohde, Secretary of GothSoc 1997/98 In September last year I started working at Manuscripts and Special Collections as a Library Assistant, and soon found out about the current initiative to collect historic and current material from University of Nottingham student societies, the Tri-Campus Contemporary Collecting Project. The project really appeals …