Reading Room Reopening!

After almost six months working from home (more about that here) Manuscripts & Special Collections is reopening the Reading Room! We have made changes to our Reading Room procedures to minimise the risk from coronavirus, so even if you’ve visited us before, please read this explaining what you can expect from your visit. New temporary …

Look at our new Digital Gallery!

Around 1,500 digitised images from our collections are now available on the Manuscripts and Special Collections Digital Gallery. We have arranged the photographs, cartoons, portraits, maps, manuscripts, and pages from books into collections based on themes. These themes can be browsed from the front page of the Digital Gallery. Click the thumbnail to get to …

How does it feel now you’ve won the war?

Guest blog by Dr Richard Gaunt It’s the name of a bridge and a railway station in London, an island in the South Shetland Islands, several townships and cities across Australia, a region in Ontario, Canada and – for good or ill – the title of the most famous song ever to have won the …

Nobel prizewinner at The University of Nottingham

Today’s glittering ceremony in Oslo honours the Nobel prizewinners of 2014. Unfortunately, none of them are from our University this year, although in 2004 Nottingham alumni were awarded two Nobel awards: the Nobel Prize for Medicine was given to Sir Peter Mansfield for his pioneering work in Magnetic Resonance Imaging, and an additional Nobel Prize …

‘Why I changed my name and did my duty’

This Wednesday sees the second of our lunchtime talks held in connection with our current exhibition ‘All Quiet in the Weston Gallery’.   In “Why I changed my name and did my duty”-one family’s experience of World War One, Emeritus Professor Malcolm Jones tells the fascinating story of the three Vince brothers who all enlisted …

Celebrating archives everywhere: “A world without records is a world without memory”

This week sees the launch of a new campaign aiming to increase awareness of the essential role of archives in society. The campaign website for Explore Your Archive details forthcoming opportunities offered by archives all around the country to engage in a range of activities, from experiencing Downton Abbey for real, learning how to write in …

Manuscripts in the Media

As a University department, it’s not surprising that many of the enquirers who contact us and visitors to the Reading Room are academics and students, both from The University of Nottingham and other institutions. What people often don’t appreciate is how often we are approached by the media, either during their initial research or because …

In Search of D H Lawrence

  If you think you know all about D H Lawrence but are struggling to remember titles beyond Lady Chatterley’s Lover or Sons and Lovers, call in on the exhibition  which opens on Friday 4 May at the Weston Gallery, Lakeside Arts Centre.  The display is entitled The Many Lives of D H Lawrence and it …

Reading the Runes

In this guest blog, Judith Jesch, Professor of Viking Studies, highlights items from our Icelandic collections in advance of the  forthcoming  Fell-Benedikz lecture about runes.     We tend to associate runes and runic inscriptions with the Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons, who used this form of writing before Christianity brought them the Roman alphabet and manuscript culture. But in Scandinavia and Iceland, …

Advent greetings from Manuscripts and Special Collections

Now that the e-advent calendar is live, we have been able to reflect on the project.  Has it achieved what we hoped for?  Our objective was to use the festive theme to illustrate the great variety of the collections. We wanted to show their potential to tell stories about people, events and past times in …