Eight Weeks with Ghost Signs
by Grace McWeeney As part of a Museum Studies 8-week work placement program, I worked with the Ghost Signs Collection at the University of Leicester. These are a few things I learned along the way. Ghost signs are not a new phenomenon. As defined by our collection parameters, a ghost sign is a ‘hand-painted advertisement […]
Archives and Special Collections Team Pick!
To mark International Archives Day, which falls on 9th June, I asked my colleagues in Archives and Special Collections to choose one of their favourite collections from our holdings. We hope that this will give you a flavour of our collections and some indication of their range. We really do have something for everyone! i […]
D-Day in the East Midlands Oral History Archive
The 1980s saw many oral history projects start across the UK. At that point there were plenty of people who had lived through both World War One and World War Two, so many recordings featured memories of these conflicts. While many recordings just cover D-Day as a brief memory, some are detailed accounts of people […]
Celebrating National Tea Day in the Archives
Since 2016, 21st April has been designated as National Tea Day, a celebration of all things British. In particular it is a celebration of tea – long held in popular culture to be the nation’s favourite beverage, although some (including the Head of Archives and Special Collections!) might argue that it has now been overtaken […]
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 […]
Views of England and Wales: a new online collection
This week we are pleased to launch Views of England and Wales, the latest collection to be added to University of Leicester Special Collections Online. We have now published over 2,000 images of historic landscapes, buildings and monuments belonging to the Centre for Regional and Local History. The majority of images are prints made in the […]