Top 10 Tips: Visiting Manuscripts & Special Collections (pt 1)
June 22, 2016
Exams are over; next semester doesn’t start for several months; and the sun is shining (it is somewhere!). For final-year dissertation students and academics it can only mean one thing: it’s time to start planning summer research trips to the archive. Hopefully these Top Tips will help first-time visitors to Manuscripts & Special Collections, although some …
Chimera Obscura? – The Value of the University’s Special Archive and Foreign-Language Skills
June 10, 2016
This is a guest post by UoN student George Jewitt about his CLAS student placement at Manuscripts and Special Collections in March/April 2016. If you’ve never been to King’s Meadow Campus, it’s worth a visit for a few reasons. The Costa is pretty cosy and it’s a great place to sit and do some work …
Picturing Shakespeare
April 22, 2016
Tomorrow, the 23rd April, is the quartercentenary of the death of William Shakespeare (1564-1616). We, and the Library more generally, have been celebrating Shakespeare throughout April. If you visited the Reading Room this month, you will have seen some of the wonderful books in our Cambridge Shakespeare Collection on display. It owes its existence to Henry Thomas Hall (1823-1894), a resident of Cambridge and …
Five Minutes With…. Ursula Ackrill
February 6, 2016
Happy National Libraries Day! To celebrate libraries and librarians, we’re borrowing the ‘Five Minutes With…’ format from the Library Matters blog and talking to our librarian Ursula, who is responsible for the ‘Special Collections’ part of Manuscripts & Special Collections. German speakers may also be familiar with her as the author of Zeiden, im Januar. What …
The Fall and Rise of Little Fanny
January 20, 2016
One of the best aspects of working with Manuscripts & Special Collections is that, every so often, we will stumble across something extraordinarily beautiful, profound or moving – and sometimes, we find something like ‘The History of Little Fanny: exemplified in a series of figures‘ (Briggs Collection Pamphlet PZ6.H4). Somehow missed off the list of great children’s …
Nottingham Advantage Award Placement: Working on Westacott
November 30, 2015
This is a guest post by Sophie Burton, an undergraduate student in the Department of History. For the Nottingham Advantage Award ‘Experience Heritage’ module I have been conducting a weekly placement at Manuscripts and Special Collections. The placement has informed me about the different roles within the heritage sector. I have undertaken digitisation work on …
Expressing the Unspeakable
November 3, 2015
A version of this post appeared on the University’s LGBT History blog earlier this year. It’s often overlooked compared to Lady Chatterley’s Lover or its sequel Women in Love, but a century ago this month, D H Lawrence’s The Rainbow was the subject of a court case about sex, literature, and censorship. The set-up is typical for a …
Purchasing Pansies: a new addition to the DH Lawrence collections
October 27, 2015
Manuscripts and Special Collections has recently acquired an important original typescript of D.H. Lawrence’s Pansies. The typescript was purchased by the University of Nottingham with assistance from the ACE/V & A Purchase Fund and the Friends of the National Libraries. The title of the volume of poems has nothing to do with the flower of …
Spotlight on Slavery
October 18, 2015
Today is Anti-Slavery Day in the UK, which was established to raise awareness of the estimated 20 million people worldwide currently living in slavery. This year also sees the 150th anniversary of the formal abolition of slavery in the United States. The 13th amendment to the Constitution declaring that “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude…shall exist within the …
Watching Lady Chatterley
September 1, 2015
It’s either surprisingly chaste or shockingly racy, but fifty-five years after being the subject of an obscenity court case, the sexual content of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is once again making the news. The BBC has commissioned a one-off 90 minute version of DH Lawrence’s 1928 novel, which will air on 6th September. The sexual relationship …
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