But what do you do all day? Our third lockdown diary
June 29, 2020
This is the third in a series of blogs looking at the work that Manuscripts and Special Collections staff have been doing from home, and we are once again focussing on the additions to our manuscripts catalogue. New Online Catalogue In the first of this series of blogs, I talked about the planned upgrade to our archival management software, …
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
June 25, 2020
In the 17th and 18th centuries, a time before Instagram, National Geographic, or even David Attenborough, there was great interest amongst Europeans in the animals which roamed distant realms. These fantastic beasts were eagerly read about in publications written by explorers brave enough to adventure to far-off lands, with detailed engravings made from eye-witness accounts …
Family and Local History
June 15, 2020
A University library and archive is not the first port of call for many family historians. Manuscripts & Special Collections has more resources than some, and you don’t need to be staff or student at the University to come and use them. Normally we would have a stall at the Local History & Archaeology Festival …
But what do you do all day? – Our second lockdown diary
June 10, 2020
This is the second of our lockdown diaries, looking at the work that staff in Manuscripts and Special Collections have been doing since we switched to home-working. In last week’s blog the focus was on cataloguing; this week I want to look at some of the behind-the-scenes work that we’ve been doing to improve the …
Colley Cibber
June 8, 2020
If ever there was a case of success and fame being the result of luck, rather than talent, then Colley Cibber is it. He was an awful poet who became Poet Laureate through his political connections; a middling actor who connived to became a pioneering actor-manager in Drury Lane; and an unscrupulous and divisive man …
But what do you do all day? Our Lockdown Diary
June 1, 2020
We closed the doors to our reading room at 5pm on Friday 20th March and since then all our members of staff have been working from home. Now, in the first of a series of blogs, we want to update you on what we’ve been working on whilst socially-distancing from our beloved archive and rare book …
Planning the Trent Building
May 22, 2020
Guest blog by Emelia Dengel and Oliver Lack, Geography undergraduates who completed a work placement at Manuscripts and Special Collections. For our placement at MSC we were tasked with cataloguing and repackaging a group of over 150 architectural and engineering plans of Trent Building dating from the 1920s to the 1990s. The Trent Building opened …
Florence and the 5th Duke
May 12, 2020
When Derbyshire’s own Florence Nightingale set out for the military hospitals of the Crimean War on 21st October 1854 she did so at the behest of another local figure, Henry Pelham Clinton, 5th Duke of Newcastle. As the owner of Clumber Park in Nottinghamshire the Duke was an important figure locally, but he also had …
Victory in Europe Day
May 8, 2020
Today is Victory in Europe Day, marking the 75th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender to the Allies in World War II. Adolf Hitler had committed suicide on 30 April once it became clear that Germany’s military forces were on the brink of collapse. He was succeeded by Karl Dönitz, formerly the Supreme Commander of …
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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