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 […]
Library and Learning Services
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 […]
Library events for International Open Access Week, 23-29 October 2023
International Open Access Week is an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research. This year’s theme, Community Over […]
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. […]
Changes to the Doctoral College Reading Room
The Doctoral College Reading Room on the first floor of the Library is a dedicated study space for Postgraduate Research Students (PGRs) and staff. Those of you that use the reading room regularly will have seen that the space is changing due to a reconfiguration within the Library. Thank you for your patience whilst we […]
Museums in Ukraine and a tribute to Jim Roberts
Museum and Society have published a new issue on University of Leicester Open Journals. It is a special issue about museums in Ukraine, and will be of interest to anyone involved in partnership work with Ukrainian heritage organisations and universities. Articles include: and more. Read them all here. There is also a tribute to Jim […]
Open access deal with Springer Nature
Following a year-long negotiation led by Jisc, the University of Leicester is among UK universities who have agreed a new, three-year read and publish open access (OA) deal with Springer Nature. The negotiations were governed by pre-agreed sector requirements. Following the signing and implementation of the agreement, our university will work alongside the sector to […]
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 […]