SPACE RESOURCES GUIDANCE RESEARCH LEARNING
ISSUE 02 - MARCH 2018
LIBRARIES AND LEARNING
NATURE AT DMU OUR THEMATIC EXPLORATION INTO THE STUDY OF NATURAL FORMS
NEW ACQUISITIONS BASKETBALL, TEXTILES AND COALMINIG
GUEST ARTICLE BY SENIOR LECTURER DR ALICE WOOD
DMU SPECIAL COLLECTIONS NEWSLETTER
WELCOME Welcome to the second issue of DMU Special Collections newsletter! DMU Special Collections team are part of Library and Learning Services. We care for archives, rare books and artefacts housed in room 00.21 of the Kimberlin Library. These include records of the institution dating back to 1870 as well as a growing collection of archives relating to subject specialisms of university research centres, including fashion, sports history, photography and performing arts. The Autumn and Spring Terms have been very busy for Special Collections with lots of new and exciting accessions (which you can read more about on page 8) and teaching events for a number of faculties and schools, including workshops for Fashion, Footwear, English, Sports Management and History students. This newsletter aims to highlight our exciting collections to new audiences as well as celebrate our achievements and showcase research using our holdings. In this issue you will find a spring time thematic exploration of nature, a spotlight on collection care and preservation and a guest article by one of DMU’s senior lecturers in English, Alice Wood, who regularly uses the women’s magazines collection for her own research and teaching. Our next issues are scheduled for the Summer Term and Autumn Term of 2018. Please let us know if you would like to be added to our mailing list for either paper or electronic versions. We welcome suggestions and comments; please contact archives@dmu.ac.uk or tweet us @DMUSpecialColls. Katharine Short De Montfort University Archivist All information correct at time of printing. Opinions and views expressed are those of the author not DMU.
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CONTENTS DMU Special Collections.......................... 3 Latest News.................................................. 4 Behind the Scenes..................................... 5 Guest Article................................................ 6 New Collections & Catalogues............... 8 Heritage Centre.......................................... 9 Thematic Exploration.................................. 10 Then and Now!............................................ 12
SPACE RESOURCES GUIDANCE RESEARCH LEARNING
DMU SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
LIBRARIES AND LEARNING
Archives and Rare Books
Open Monday 9am-2pm Tuesday to Friday 9am-5pm. Kimberlin Library 00.21
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MU Special Collections is part of Library and Learning Services based in the Kimberlin Library. We hold varied material including archives, rare books, artwork and artefacts. The main archive collection relates to the history of DMU, tracing the development and activities of the institution from its founding in 1870 as the Leicester School of Art, its years as the Colleges of Art and Technology, then Leicester Polytechnic, and its current status as De Montfort University. Special Collections also seeks to accrue material which relates to specialist subjects taught at DMU, in order to enhance teaching, learning and research at the University. These subjects include: photographic history, sports history,
fashion and textiles, art and design, literature, performance and the history of Leicester. Catalogues for the archives collection can be found on the Archives Hub, while rare books are catalogued as part of the main DMU Library catalogue. In addition to caring for our collections we assist researchers, hold a programme of outreach activities such as talks, tours and displays, contribute to records management and research data management strategies across the university, collaborate with heritage partners across Leicester and the East Midlands, and run a successful student volunteering programme.
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LATEST NEWS
Being A Man Festival at the Southbank Centre
East Midland Coalminig Heritage Forum Following our acquisition of archives relating to coal mining in Leicestershire, Special Collections has been invited to join the East Midlands Coalmining Heritage Forum. We look forward to developing a fruitful partnership with other institutions caring for coal mining history.
In November Special Collections was invited to attend the Being A Man festival at London’s South Bank Centre. Archivist Katharine Short and academic Neil Carter from the International Centre for Sports History and Culture travelled down to London with highlights from the England Boxing collection. The aim was to showcase a traditionally masculine sport in keeping with the festival’s theme of challenging what it means to be male in the modern world. Nearly 100 visitors to the festival stopped by to browse a mix of documents, brochures and artefacts including medals, Olympics Games tickets and photographs.
Good Bye Shikha and Gursharan! Special Collections bids a fond farewell and thank you to Shikha Chopra, Frontrunner, and Gursharan Hayre, Graduate Champion. Both have done invaluable work for us during their internships, in particular tackling our cataloguing backlog. We wish them both all the best with their future careers!
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E E V I R H O C L EXP YOUR AR E NT G E A V T E I T HER CRAF
At the end of November Special Collections were delighted to offer a programme of events during the national Explore Your Archive event. As well as producing a series of blogs and spending a lot of time Twittering, we held three campus roadshows showcasing archive holdings to our students. We finished the week in grand style, with archives displays in the Heritage Centre, Trinity Hospital Chapel and Leicester Castle alongside medieval themed craft activities for children.
BEHIND THE SCENES
COLLECTIONS CARE
When we receive a new collection we often remove it from the boxes or bags it has come in and repackage it.
The way in which archives are stored and packaged is a vital part of taking care of them. Good packaging protects the material from environmental threats such as damp, dirt and pests. It also prevents damage from storage, transit and handling by staff and researchers. These photographs show examples from our collection of damage done by unsuitable packaging and the immense satisfaction of a neatly packaged collection!
Chemicals react with backing card leaving an impression of the text.
The items are then placed into specialist acid-free folders, envelopes or sleeves and then putting these within acid-free boxes. These photographs show examples from our collection of damage done by unsuitable packaging and the immense satisfaction of a neatly packaged collection!
Old, unsuitable packaging can itself be a significant threat to a collection, usually causing deterioration over time as chemicals in the packaging interact with those in the document. Dyes in folders can leave stains, plastic document wallets can lift the ink off a page and metal clips can rust and mark paper.
Rubber bands dry over time and adhere to the papers surface.
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GUEST ARTICLE
USING LADIES AND WOMENS MAGAZINES FOR RESEARCH IN ENGLISH BY DR. ALICE WOOD
In December 2017 I accompanied a group of MA English students into the Kimberlin Library to explore the Special Collections. The archivist, Katharine Short, gave us a wonderful introduction to the wealth of materials available for postgraduate students of English Language, Literature, and Creative Writing, from the Andrew Davies Script Archive to early children’s picturebooks. The focus of our seminar was the women’s magazines collection. Newspapers and magazines offer a valuable window into the past, but these relatively cheap, ephemeral publications often escape preservation. Luckily, DMU Special Collections holds a fantastic selection of women’s periodicals dating from the 18th through to the 20th Century, many of which are hard to access outside of legal deposit libraries like the British Library. The MA English students began by looking at examples of women’s magazines from different eras. DMU Special Collections has some very early women’s periodicals such as The New Lady’s Magazine, or, Polite, Useful, and Entertaining Monthly Companion for the Fair Sex (1792), which provided upper-class women with national and international news, poetry, riddles, and entertaining articles. We also saw issues of The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine from the mid-1800s, edited by Samuel Beeton and his wife Isabella (famous for her cookbook!) – the first English magazine sold cheaply for young middle-class women with domestic management advice, cookery, fashion, and fiction.
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I was keen to share my interest in 20th-century domestic and fashion magazines, including early Good Housekeeping and Vogue. My academic research explores the range of authors who wrote for women’s periodicals in the 1920s and 1930s. I am fascinated by the diverse content of these magazines, which were often much more engaged with politics and social issues than we might expect. The students were surprised to find discussion of the rise of European fascism and the campaign for disarmament in 1930s Good Housekeeping, for example, and novelist Kate O’Brien’s heated discussion of the law that meant ‘Women who Marry Foreigners’ lost their right to British citizenship at this time.
As preparation for our seminar, I had shared images of an essay by Virginia Woolf on ‘Great Men’s Houses’ printed in Good Housekeeping in March 1932. This was one of a series of six essays Woolf wrote for the magazine, which were later collected and published in a book titled The London Scene. The students considered how reading issues of Good Housekeeping from this period contextualises Woolf’s essays, such as showing us that ‘Great Men’s Houses’ mimics and subverts the format of popular celebrity homes features in the magazine at this time. Hopefully some of our MA English students will be back in the Archive soon to pursue their own research in DMU Special Collections. We are so lucky to have this excellent resource on campus staffed by such a knowledgeable and helpful team! Alice Wood Senior Lecturer in English Literature
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NEW COLLECTIONS & CATALOGUES
NEW ARRIVALS!
The past few months have seen some exciting new collections donated to Special Collections, which are showcased below. New catalogues are uploaded to the Archives Hub (archiveshub.jisc. ac.uk) and also announced via our Twitter feed (@ DMUSpecialColls).
Papers of community and social work lecturer David Batchelor, including photographs and prospectuses for the National College for Training Youth Leaders, 1950s-1990s
Leicester Riders basketball team including match programmes, press cuttings and statistics, 1970s-2016
Leicester Area National Union of Mineworkers papers, featuring minutes, correspondenc reports, maps and chart 1930s-1980s
Knitted fabric samples from the Stibbe company, manufacturers of industrial knitting machines
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HERITAGE CENTRE
HERITAGE SUNDAYS DMU Heritage Centre and Leicester City Council will partner once more to deliver Heritage Sundays. Situated around The Newarke and DMU campus, a short walk from the city centre, visitors can explore some of Leicester’s best kept secrets during the last Sunday of the month free of charge. Sites open include The Heritage Centre featuring the crypt arches of the Church of the Annunciation, Trinity Chapel and Herb Garden and the newly refurbished Leicester Castle Great Hall. Guided tours of the Castle Great Hall are available with Blue Badge Guides via the VisitLeicester website.
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CURRENT EXHIBITIONS June is your last chance to see the exhibition of R & W.H Symington & Co, co-curated with the help of Philip Warren and Sarah Nicol of the Leicestershire Museums Services. The Heritage Centre continues to trace the rich 70 year history of the Contour Fashion course, drawing on previous student work and items donated to Special Collections.
OPENING HOURS Tuesday - Friday 12pm - 5pm CONTACT (0116) 207 8729 heritage@dmu.ac.uk
At the end of June the Heritage Centre will launch a new exhibition in partnership with University Hospitals Leicester. It will showcase artefacts from the old Royal Infirmary Museum and will coincide with the 70th anniversary of the founding of the NHS.
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THEMATIC EXPLORATION
NATURE
Drawing Inspiration from the Natural World Now that Spring is here and it feels as if the world is coming back to life we have chosen nature as our theme for this issue; both as a subject of scientific study and artistic representation. Presented here you can see items from our rare books and archive collections that showcase the different ways that nature has featured in a variety of courses throughout DMU’s history. The Leicester Technical School was founded to provide basic science education to Leicester’s working classes, and this included botany which was first intended for pharmacy students. By the 1950s these classes had expanded into a Department of Biology which taught botany, zoology, physiology and applied biology – the latter including evening classes in the Science of Meat for butchers, classes on the anatomy of the foot for the boot and shoe industry, horticulture and industrial bacteriology. In the time of Leicester Polytechnic the department was renamed as the School of Life Sciences, teaching “biological disciplines” with an emphasis on applied aspects, supplementing the lectures with practical work. These included expeditions to the Orkneys, Arctic Norway, Greenland and the Shetland Islands. Today, DMU continues this long tradition with a Biomedical course.
The study of natural objects was considered of vital importance for artists in training. In 1910 students at the Leicester School of Art would participate in classes that involved drawing from natural objects, plant forms, anatomy and landscape. Studies progressed in particular order, beginning with training in modelling simple natural forms, then copying from existing works before being allowed to draw real-life models. In the 1950s this sort of basic training was still considered essential, with classes at the College of Art including “general drawing, still life, natural form, life and costume” and “plant drawing or life drawing”. Art and science combine in the field of anatomical, botanical and zoological illustration. Until photographic technology improved, drawing detailed images was the best way to convey scientific information about nature, be it plant or animal life.
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SPACE RESOURCES GUIDANCE RESEARCH LEARNING
THEN
! W O N AND
LIBRARIES AND LEARNING
The hospital was rebuilt on two storeys in 1776.
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In 1901 the building was partially demolished to make way for a new road.
De Montfort University Kimberlin Library 00.21 Mill Lane Leicester LE1 9BH T: +44 (0)116 207 8776 E: archives@dmu.ac.uk W: dmuspecialcollections.our.dmu.ac.uk @dmuspecialcolls
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The hospital was an almshouse for the impoverished elderly people of Leicester.