Homage to the Arboreal World

Trees have long been of significant importance to the human species. Our relationship with trees began with their ability to satisfy neolithic needs such as shelter and nutrients, which progressively shifted towards trees’ later central contribution to the evolution of agriculture and machinery. Indeed, major socio-economic changes over the 15th to 18th Centuries saw the …

The Cold War in the Cold Store

In the week before Christmas Manuscripts and Special Collections’ staff carried out an internal relocation of material and repackaging exercise that involved the entire section. To make this happen we decided to close the library to the public, freeing all staff to work in the library’s archival store. That week we donned warm layers and …

MRI Collections Project: Slides – A reversal in fortune

This is a guest post by Jonny Davies, Digitisation Assistant for the MRI Collections Project, funded by the Wellcome Trust Research Resources Awards. For the past few months I’ve been working with the MRI archives at the University of Nottingham which contain nearly 18500 slides produced between the 1970s and 1990s.  These slides are in …

Mapping a Career in Conservation

This is a guest post by Kelly Grimshaw, former volunteer and University of Nottingham English graduate who approached us with an interest in a career in heritage. In the summer of 2015 I volunteered with the Manuscripts and Special Collections Department for two and a half months. I was involved in three projects: sourcing archival …

Doodles and Divinity

This is a guest post by Ashleigh Fowler, student from the School of English. Since November 2014 I have been cataloguing the Ashby de la Zouch Parish Library as one of three student volunteers chosen to work on the collection. The library is, unsurprisingly, largely theological texts with a large helping of classical Greek literature, but …

Saving the Soviet War Posters

I have recently finished working to conserve eight Russian posters; these plus many more posters can now be seen on our Windows on War online resource. The TASS posters were created during the difficult war years between 1943-45, although production ran from 1941 to 1946. They are known as TASS posters because they were produced …