Tri Campus Collecting: Freshers, punks, and trainspotters in the University Archives
September 20, 2015
A warm welcome to the #UoN Freshers who will be attending the Welcome Festival at University Park, Nottingham. Here you will be able to find out about all the clubs and societies that will distract you from any residual homesickness over the coming months, and help you to meet the friends you will hopefully cherish …
Tri-Campus Collecting Project: Time Capsule
September 9, 2015
Time Capsule Blogs by Sarah Colborne, Archivist (Collections), Manuscripts and Special Collections Manuscripts and Special Collections need your help to enrich the University archive collections and make them more representative! Here at Manuscripts and Special Collections we support The University of Nottingham by acquiring, preserving and developing archives, manuscripts and rare books for use in teaching, research …
Monday Mysteries
August 10, 2015
Those of you who follow us on Twitter might get a sense of deja vu with the images in today’s post! For the last few weeks we have been posting some of the many ‘mystery’ photographs from our collections, in the hopes that someone may be able to shed light on who the people are. Often we …
Doodles and Divinity
July 20, 2015
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 …
Gongster and the ‘Gay News’ poem
February 25, 2015
Since its inception in 1939, The University of Nottingham student newspaper Gongster (now Impact) has often been used as a platform to rally against oppression and censorship, even when the paper itself has come under scrutiny and dictates. In 1978, however, the paper became a victim of censorship itself; in this particular case by their …
A love of letters
February 14, 2015
Guest blog by Ellen Hart – Subscriptions Manager at The Letters Page and third year English Language & Literature student. In keeping with the season and its sentiment, this is a blog about love and correspondence (and a love of correspondence). In my job as Subscriptions Manager at The Letters Page I spend a lot …
Finding your Family
June 2, 2014
Within the 4 million documents held in Manuscripts and Special Collections are the names of hundreds of thousands of people from Nottinghamshire and the broader East Midlands. Catalogues can never list every person named in documents, so one of the major challenges of family history research is finding which records may refer to your ancestors. …
Throwback to The Gongster
April 3, 2014
A collection of student newspapers dating back nearly 120 years is proving to be a rich resource for researchers and staff at The University of Nottingham. Manuscripts and Special Collections has almost a complete run of the University’s student magazine, The Gongster, from its inception in 1939 to its closure in 1978. It was originally created as …
“No Turtle is an Island”
February 7, 2013
One of the benefits of working in Special Collections is serendipitously finding an intriguing, amusing or surprising book amongst the 50,000 volumes held here. Whilst answering an enquiry recently, a member of staff came across this quirky poem by Melvin Plotinsky. ‘Requiem for a Turtle’ memorialises a turtle (tortoise), killed crossing a road in May …
What are your chances of a job?
August 22, 2012
Over the past year, Manuscripts & Special Collections has been gradually digitising our early copies of The University of Nottingham’s student newspaper ‘The Gongster’. It makes fascinating reading, comparing student life then and now, but this article from 11th October 1951 about the woes of graduate employment particularly caught my eye, with its relevance to …
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