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 …
Carry on Collecting: Tri Campus contemporary collecting during lockdown
April 27, 2020
Manuscripts and Special Collections (MSC) may be WFH and unable to access the collections in our manuscripts store, but we’re still busy improving our catalogues, promoting our resources, and we’re also still busy sourcing material to add to our archives. The University’s new digital preservation system allows us to manage and preserve digital items such …
The Canterbury Tales
August 23, 2019
Geoffrey Chaucer (1340s – 25 October 1400) is widely considered the greatest English poet and author of the Middle Ages. He played a significant role in legitimising the use of the Middle English vernacular in literary works in an age when many authors in England wrote in French and Latin. He died in 1400 and …
MRI Collections Project: the papers of Raymond Andrew
August 5, 2019
Professor E. Raymond Andrew was one of the early founders of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) research at the University of Nottingham, and Manuscripts and Special Collections (MSC) are fortunate to have his papers amongst our collections. As part of the MRI Collections Project which is currently under way, Archivist Zoe Ellis describes how the team …
Rain Rain Go Away!
June 20, 2019
One of the main topics of conversation over the last week or so has been the truly atrocious weather, and even as I type this the raindrops are pattering against the office windows. This is in stark contrast to last year’s heatwave, which officially began on the 22nd June and lasted until the 7th August …
MRI Collections Project: the papers of Brian Worthington
June 13, 2019
This is a guest post from Rachael Orchard, Archives Assistant for the MRI Collections Project. Professor Brian Worthington’s papers form part of theWellcome-funded MRI Collections Project currently under way in Manuscripts and Special Collections at the University of Nottingham. He was a radiologist who was heavily involved in the development and use of magnetic resonance …
Revisiting the Dark Side; the archive of the University of Nottingham Gothic Society
March 12, 2019
A guest post by Anja Rohde, Secretary of GothSoc 1997/98 In September last year I started working at Manuscripts and Special Collections as a Library Assistant, and soon found out about the current initiative to collect historic and current material from University of Nottingham student societies, the Tri-Campus Contemporary Collecting Project. The project really appeals …
MRI Collections Project: Shining a light on slide digitisation
November 30, 2018
Work is now well under way on our exciting Wellcome Trust funded project ‘Development of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) at the University of Nottingham’, as covered in the previous blog post. Project Archivist Zoe Ellis updates us on one of the main strands of the project: the digitisation of around 18,000 35 mm slides. These …
Found: the lost archive of the Cross Country and Athletics Club
September 24, 2018
Manuscripts and Special Collections recently took in the lost archive of the University of Nottingham Cross Country and Athletics Club. Seven boxes of record books, photos and scrapbooks were bought into the MSC reading room by a former president of the Club who had saved them from destruction after discovering them hiding in the attic …