Disability History Month 2023
To mark UK Disability History Month, which falls between 16th November and 16th December, Archives and Special Collections are showcasing items from our holdings which shed light on these often hidden histories. / Our collections span a wide time period and their content can contain language and terminology reflecting contemporary attitudes that today may be […]
World Digital Preservation Day 2023: making digital preservation greener
The theme for WPDP2023 (2 November) is Digital Preservation: A Concerted Effort. This post is a write-up of an online talk to celebrate the day. It expands on the Library and Records Management’s wish to embed sustainable practices in their roles, explore efforts being made by the sector and examines how we can preserve files […]
Correspondence of war: translating the Bejach letters
Please note that this post contains content relating the Holocaust. If you are affected by this topic, please be aware of our available support information for students and support services in the community. / One of my current projects is translating the letters held in the Bejach archive, in order to improve accessibility for researchers who lack the language […]
An Overview of South Asian Collections in EMOHA
Written by Huma Ahmed. Getting the chance to study at the University of Leicester just keeps getting better! As part of my undergraduate degree studying Ancient History and History, I was able to partake in a heritage project to redesign webpages for the East Midlands Oral History Archive, or EMOHA for short. This archive preserves […]
Cataloguing photos relating to World War Two and Leicester – A work in progress
The East Midlands Oral History Archive (EMOHA) and The University of Leicester Special Collections have launched a new project, ‘Sounds for the Future’. The project is funded by The National Lottery Heritage Fund and will run from May 2022 to October 2023 with the objective of preserving, cataloguing and using EMOHA’s existing oral history collections. […]
How to use IIIF with Special Collections Online
We have recently added a new function called IIIF, and its associated Mirador viewer, to our Special Collections Online platform. If you haven’t heard of IIIF before: it stands for International Image Interoperability Framework. It is a technology that allows you view media files from online collections in a single, user-friendly viewer. It’s been developed […]
Beautiful and Artistic – Marbled Endpapers
During my time here in Archives and Special Collections I want to highlight something I have found interesting – the distinct patterns found in some rare books. Many notice the leather bindings and the gold tooling but we tend to miss the endpapers. Most of the time when we open a book, we go straight […]
Natasha Callis: My week of work experience
Guest post by Natasha Callis, work experience student. This week, I’ve been doing work experience at the University of Leicester Library. I have worked in lots of different departments have completed lots of different, small tasks related to each area of work in the library, and I have found it to be really informative. When […]
New ways of using the Historical Directories collection
Over the last 18 months, we have been collaborating with a research project called the Congruence Engine. One strand of the project has been experimenting with new ways of using our Historical Directories collection. Daniel Wilson from the project has written a blog post this week getting into the technical side of this. The workshop […]
Botanical Illustrations are not only pretty – they remain relevant today
As the University has announced an exciting programme of Summer events at the Botanic Gardens in Oadby, we explore the art of botanical illustration through our Special Collections.