Audrey Beecham: Warden, historian, poet, anarchist, feminist, and champion of the underdog

Helen Audrey Beecham (1915-1989) came to the University of Nottingham in 1950 having been    appointed warden of the newly built Nightingale Hall, which at the time was a women-only hall of residence. She served as warden and also lecturer in social and economic history for 30 years until her retirement in 1980.  Before coming …

Advocates for animal welfare: The Three Rs

Debate has long raged about the use of animals by humans, both as food and for the advancement of science. The National Anti-Vivisection Society was founded back in 1875 and the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection in 1898, by Frances Power Cobbe, campaigner for women’s suffrage and anti-vivisection activist.   The Cruelty to Animals …

History of the James Cameron-Gifford Library, Sutton Bonington Campus.

Dr James Cameron-Gifford was a leading agriculturalist born in 1909.  He first came to Nottingham in 1942 when he was appointed as Technical Officer with the Nottingham War Agricultural Committee.  The object of the committee was to increase the county’s food production, and among the many tasks allotted to Cameron-Gifford was the development of a …

Advocates for animal welfare

Work has just finished on an 18-month project to catalogue papers held by Manuscripts and Special Collections which chart the progress made in promoting the concept of the Three Rs, the guiding principles of Reduction, Replacement and Refinement, in regards to the use of animals in scientific research. The work was made possible by a …

My experience interning for Manuscripts and Special Collections

This is a guest post by Helena, who successfully applied for a Faculty of Arts funded summer work experience placement. I’m Helena, a second-year History student at the University of Nottingham and I had the amazing experience of getting a placement and working at King’s Meadow Campus for a couple of weeks. My role was …

Remote volunteering: tackling transcriptions

This is a guest post by Manuscripts and Special Collections volunteer, Emily Williams, who worked with digitised versions of analogue recordings for a remote placement devised especially for providing careers experience when we were unable to host volunteers in our reading room. Commencing in the summer of 2020, I was given the opportunity to complete …

George Green Library: A Photographic History

George Green Library, originally known simply as the Science Library, was one of various buildings funded in the 1950s and 60s which signalled a massive investment in science teaching and research at the University of Nottingham, facilitated by the Vice Chancellor of the time, Bertrand Hallward. Although the proposed Science Library was originally conceived to …

Highlighting the History of Sutton Bonington

Originally, Sutton and Bonington were two settlements, probably originating in Anglo-Saxon times. The two villages gradually grew together and by 1340 had become “Sutton Bonynton”. Today, the villages host to the University of Nottingham’s rural campus. An insight into 17th century Sutton Bonington is provided by a presentment bill dating from 1632, which forms part …

Digital Collecting for the University Archives

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.   …

Spooky Scary Skeletons

Guest post by Anja Rohde, Library Assistant. On Wednesday 27th January 1943 Nottingham students awoke to an unusual sight – a skeleton was suspended from the clock tower of the Trent Building. This was ‘Mrs Criker’, one of the mascots of Goldsmiths College, London, and it had been kidnapped by Nottingham students. At the start …