Library Special Collections

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Motor City Stories

Coventry University's 1932 Lanchester car on the move

Archivist Gary Collins explains how the digitisation of an audio collection is enabling its contents to be used in a variety of ways, including for Coventry City of Culture 2021.   The opportunity to get one of Coventry University’s taped interview collections digitised by the British Library’s Unlocking Our Sound Heritage (UOSH) project, whose Midlands […]

Audio heritage in Leicestershire & Rutland

 This exhibition was in the basement of the University library for the first few months of 2020. It featured items related to the history of sound recording and oral history in Leicestershire & Rutland from the 1950s to the present. The links below follow on from items mentioned in the video.     Early […]

Writing yourself into the archives

Writing yourself into the archives

Seeing other institutions’ reactions to the coronavirus pandemic has encouraged the Archives & Special Collections team to think about what we can do to collect Leicester’s responses to it, both official and personal.     While I (Vicky) have been busy experimenting with WebRecorder to collect the University’s Covid-19 response pages, and saving emails detailing […]

Keep Calm and Scroll On! (Pt.4)

Remote working!

  One thing I’ve observed during the lockdown is how eerily quiet it is in the evenings!   With a reduction in the number of cars on the road, planes in the air, and trains on the tracks many people across the UK have witnessed the effects of noise pollution. I have found however, that […]

Keep Calm and Scroll On! (Pt.3)

Keep Calm and Scroll On! (Pt.3)

  Spring has finally sprung! 🙂    I’m enjoying passing the rows of blossom trees on my ‘once-a-day’ permitted exercise and I was reminded of a photograph from the archives of the campus in spring. I’m surprised by how different the library looks pre-renovation! Is anyone else having library blues?   In part 3 , […]

Keep Calm and Scroll On! (Pt. 2)

Keep Calm and Scroll On! (Pt. 2)

        Although we can’t meet physically, the Archives & Special Collections team have enjoyed catching up virtually in our new work stations. There have been some staff changes over the past couple of years so here are few of us in action!                     […]

Keep Calm and Scroll On!

Missing our strongroom (archive store)

      Hello from our homes!   We had to bid a sad farewell to our archive store and reading room last week, as the Library building closed to ensure the safety of staff and users during the current COVID-19 pandemic.   Like many of our colleagues in the Library, the Archives & Special […]

Looking through the Record Office boxes

Looking through the Record Office boxes

One of the features of the Unlocking Our Sound Heritage project is that we want to create the opportunity for volunteers to learn new skills. One of our volunteers, Ewan Shaw, has been working with old reel to reel tapes. There are several boxes sitting on the shelves of the Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester & […]

The Platform recordings – trains, planes, automobiles and volunteers.

The Great Central Railway station, Loughborough

  In 1974 John Kirby and Geoff Smith started ‘Platform’, a BBC Radio Leicester series about transport. Kirby was already making educational programmes for BBC Radio Leicester as part of a teaching secondment. He met John Cole while visiting the Rev. Teddy Boston’s model railway in Cadeby, Leicestershire, and Cole joined the programme in 1975. […]

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