UCL Library Service’s annual exhibition for 2024, “‘I Planted a Seed’: Childhood, nature, and creativity”, has recently opened in the Main Library!  

This exhibition explores how children’s imaginations are inspired by nature in their storytelling, exploration and creative world. The exhibition starts with the classroom and how nature supports creative learning in children. It then moves on to examine children’s own creative output and how nature is reflected in music, dance, play and textiles.  

On display are items from the IOE Archives and the Folklore Society collection, as well as material from outside of Special Collections including the IOE Rare Books collection and the IOE Curriculum Resources collection.  

‘I Planted a Seed’ is located in the Main Library Stairwell and 1st floor. It is free and open to the public. External visitors can book a ticket on the exhibition webpage. You can also access the exhibition catalogue and digitized collection items online.  

On the 25^th September a new exhibition, ‘Generation UCL: 200 Years of Student Life in London’, opened in UCL’s Octagon Gallery. The exhibition explores two centuries of student life at UCL, placing them at the centre of the university’s history. Mounted in anticipation of UCL’s bicentenary celebrations in 2026, it also marks 130 years of Students’ Union UCL, one of the largest student-led organisations in the world. Material has been contributed by UCL Special Collections, UCL Museums, Students’ Union UCL, and UCL alumni.

The exhibition is part of the wider Generation UCL research project, which looks to explore the lives of UCL students and present them as the real ‘founders’ of the university.

Over the past 9 months, members of the Special Collections team have been working alongside Professor Georgina Brewis and Dr Sam Blaxland, of the Generation UCL team, to select and prepare material for display. Fifty of the items featured in the exhibition are taken from the University College and IOE archive collections, making it one of the largest Special Collections exhibitions in recent years.

Items included range from official UCL publications and records, such as student record cards, files and calendars, to union and society magazines and posters. Thanks to a recent donation by Students’ Union UCL of the collection of UCL alum, Professor Mark Curtin, we have had the opportunity to display a number of objects too. These include a 1940s blazer and silk scarf worn by Geography student Enid Sampson, a UCL Botany department microscope, academic medals and union badges.

Other objects were uncovered in the process of putting together the initial longlist. A visit to the College Archives silver store back in April resulted in the discovery of a full set of 1950s cutlery (including fish knife!) that had been used by students at Bentham Hall.

With a vast amount of material to choose from the process of shortlisting was tough! However, some clever design on the part of Polytechnic studio meant that we have also been able to display material that would otherwise have been left out. The two arches that lead into the gallery have now been covered in digitised copies of publications, posters, adverts, and invitations, which were created for, or by, UCL students. If you are in the space, see if you can spot a Student’s Guide to Computers from 1996, an advert for a 1960s Pink Floyd gig and a 1981 Student Survival guide with the title ‘Don’t panic: it’s too late anyway!’.

The exhibition is open now until August 2024 and is free for all to attend. For more information about the creation of the exhibition visit the exhibition project page.

The following was adapted from text written by Erika Delbecque and Tabitha Tuckett for the 2023 exhibition catalogue Hidden in Plain Sight: Liberating our Library Collections. The Main Library exhibition Hidden in Plain Sight is open until December 2023 and is open to the public. For more information, visit UCL Library’s Exhibition page.

 

Since 2021, we’ve run the Liberating the Collections volunteer project. Volunteers search our catalogues for Rare Books related to marginalised voices, including examples of historical LGBT+ writers in our collections. The items identified by our volunteers illustrate diversity of sexuality and gender identities present in our collections, while also highlighting the difficulty of applying modern notions of LGBT+ identites to authors who predate them.

One example is Katherine Philips (1632-63). She was one of the first female poets whose work was published during her lifetime. We have several editions of her poetry in our collections, including the 1669 edition of Poems by the most deservedly admired Mrs Katherine Philips.

Philips wrote vivid poems about friendships between women, interpreted by some critics as examples of lesbian poetry. One of her poems, “To my Lucasia, in defence of declared Friendship.” begins:

1.

O My Lucasia, let us speak of our Love,

And think not that impertinent can be,

Which to us both doth such assurance prove,

And whence we find how justly we agree.

2.

Before we knew the treasures of our Love,

Our noble aims our joys did entertain;

And shall enjoyment nothing then improve?

‘Twere best for us then to begin again.

 

The debate on whether Philips’s work should be read as such points to the difficulty of applying modern notions of sexuality and sexual identity to historical authors.

Charlotte Charke (1713–60) lived and worked as a man for much of her life, defying some of the career limitations for women in eighteenth-century England. Her autobiography A narrative of the life of Mrs Charlotte Charke … Her adventures in men’s cloaths records her experiences. To contemporaries she was notorious, but her works in our collections have received little attention until recently.

We use she/her pronouns when describing her as those are the pronouns she used to describe herself.

Charke acted on the stage in male roles, ran a puppet theatre staging political satire and worked in the traditionally male jobs of a gentleman’s valet and a farmer. Unfortunately she paid a price for doing so: frequently short of money, she was estranged from her father and two husbands, against whose affairs and gambling debts she rebelled. Only towards the end of her life, as a writer, did she find success with this book, an early example of a published autobiography written by a woman. We might be tempted to apply anachronistic terms of gender identity to Charke, but the survival of her autobiography at least enables us to read about her life in her own words.

During the eighteenth century, English guidebooks claiming to describe the dangerous temptations of London life to the innocent and respectable reader became popular. They enabled a vicarious exploration of illicit or unconventional sexual behaviour and gender that did not endanger either author or reader. The midnight spy … exhibiting .. bagnios, jelly houses .. and other places of midnight resort, focusing on London’s nightlife, includes an account of jelly houses and bagnios – restaurants and bathhouses that served as brothels where men could pick up both women and other men for sex, although the text does not clarify whether it describes homosexual or heterosexual activity.

Publications of this sort sold well and critical reviews from 1766 mention that passages of this book had been re-used from previous similar titles. Such comments suggest that this may not have been the most up-to-date account of London nightlife during time of rapid change in the capital as the Industrial Revolution began.

These items were indentified by Isobel Goodman (2021 Liberating the Collections volunteer), Chris Fripp (Liberating the
Collections pilot-project researcher 2019–20), and Michael Niedzwiecki (2022 Liberating the Collections volunteer). Thanks to their work, we can highlight these items and ensure they are no longer hidden on our shelves and in our catalogue.

If you would like to see these items for yourself, they are on display in the Main Library until December 2023.

 

 

The following is by Rozz Evans, Head of Collection Strategy and co-chair of the Library Liberating the Collections Steering Group. It was originally published in the introduction to our 2023 Exhibition Catalogue “Hidden in Plain Sight: Liberating our Library Collections” and has been slightly edited for the purposes of the blog.

UCL Library Services holds a rich and diverse range of collections containing almost two million printed items (alongside an extensive digital library). These collections comprise both Special Collections (a term that we use broadly to describe our rare books, archives and records)  and Teaching Collections. As Head of Collection Strategy, I work closely with our Head of Special Collections, Sarah Aitchison. We are responsible not only for the development, care and curation of our collections, but also for ensuring that we prioritise our effort and resources in the form of money, staff and space. An important aspect of this is our commitment to uncovering the hugely diverse material within our existing collections, enabling us to give a  voice to those who have been historically less visible.

As an institution, UCL has been very public about its commitment to addressing issues  around Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) for some years. Arguably the most high-profile work has been around eugenics, UCL’s part in  its history and its enduring impact.

However, institutional effort goes far wider than this. For example, UCL was one of the first institutions in the UK to set up its Liberating the  Curriculum project in 2016 to improve the inclusivity and diversity of its reading lists. One of the outcomes of this was a community of  practice, bringing together colleagues from across the university who are working in this area; this now has a broader remit than the original  project.

It is this group that inspired the name of our Library Liberating the Collections Steering Group (LLTC), which we set up in July 2020 to plan, monitor and oversee our work in this area. We have developed an action plan based around three key themes of Description and Visibility,  Collection Policy and Communication and Engagement.

‘Liberating’ is a term that already has currency in UCL and beyond. It conveys an active approach to this work and its broadness  demonstrates how this group is working to uncover, identify and promote a more inclusive collection in relation to all under-represented  voices. This means that although there will be specific projects in the realm of decolonisation, for example, the remit is broader than race and  racism. We feel strongly that it is important not to use terminology such as decolonisation as a shorthand for wider issues around diversity and inclusion.

UCL Library Services’ collections were initially built from departmental libraries, gifts, donations and bequests, supplemented by some  purchases. In the library’s earliest accessions registers it is clear that the focus was on generating teaching collections and filling shelves. This meant that there was no strategic approach to developing a collection, and therefore was primarily reflective of the status of donors. This is  very different to how we acquire material today. This involves a much more selective, considered and proactive process, governed by clear  and transparent collection policies that are available on our website.

This also means that in some cases – particularly in our older material – our collections tend to reflect historic bias and structural  inequalities in the university and in the society of the time. These include a normalisation of white, male, Western-centric theories, views,  experiences and opinions. This certainly does not mean that we do not hold material which relates to under-represented authors and  communities. However, it has become apparent that many of the systems and processes traditionally used by libraries in the curation,  management and description of the collections serve to perpetuate systemic bias and can make it difficult to discover this material. For example, the widespread adoption of international cataloguing standards, such as Library of Congress Subject Headings, makes it difficult to  challenge or change the use of outdated or discriminatory language in catalogue records.

We are also aware that our collections include content that is now considered discriminatory or harmful, and we must be explicit that its existence in our collections does not represent UCL’s current views.

Traditionally libraries have hidden behind ‘neutrality’ as a way of  preserving objectionable content without proper contextualisation, regardless of the harm it can cause to our academic and cultural  understanding of these items. However, their historical importance means that we cannot simply remove or delete such items from our  collections. Instead we are looking at how we can contextualise such material, acknowledging where necessary the harm these items might do to some of our users and alerting them to problematic content where we can. Pairing re-contextualisation with a celebration of previously ignored voices allows us to have a fuller understanding of our history and culture.

Working in this space tends to require a lot of background research and reflection before any work can begin, much less before the books and other materials are made available for use. “Hidden in Plain Sight” does not represent a finished project, but sets the scene for ongoing investigation,  discovery and promotion. Staff and volunteers have been working for many months or years, and this will continue to be the case. In the next few years we hope that more of our collections – already full of interesting stories, diverse voices and differing perspectives on colonialism –  will be accessible to students, staff and researchers. “Hidden in Plain Sight” is thus a teaser of things to come.

We hope that this exhibition also embodies a spirit of hope and excitement, as well as an ongoing commitment to ensuring that UCL Library’s collections are truly reflective of the richness and diversity of our shared history.

For more information on the history of UCL Library Services, check out our 2019 Exhibition catalogue “From Small Library Beginnings: a brief history of UCL Library Services.”

“Hidden in Plain Sight: Liberating our Collections” is on display in the Main Library Stairwell and 1st floor until December 2023. Exhibition items and catalogue are also available online.

Our new Main Library exhibition “Hidden in Plain Sight: Liberating our Library Collections” is now open! The exhibition is free and open to members of the public.

Across UCL Library Services, staff members, students and volunteers have been working together to discover, record and celebrate the diverse voices in our collections. Through a number of projects, overseen by the Library Liberating the Collections Steering Group, we have gained a better understanding of our collections and improved their accessibility. However, we are at the early stages of this important initiative and there is still more work to be done.

The exhibition is located in the Main Library Staircase and First Floor. It is open to the public – just speak to a member of the Main Library front desk about getting a 15 minute pass to see the exhibition.

A catalogue for the exhibition is available online.

Items in the exhibition have also been digitised.

The following was adapted from text written by Erika Delbecque and Tabitha Tuckett for the 2023 exhibition catalogue Hidden in Plain Sight: Liberating our Library Collections, which will be available online at the end of March. The Main Library exhibition Hidden in Plain Sight will also be opening at the end of March. Keep an eye out for an opening date announcement coming soon!

Often when we look at books in our collection, our preconceived notions about the historical roles of women in society can cause us to make assumptions about the history of an item. After all, what could the collected works of Francis Bacon, a former Lord High Chancellor of England, tell us about the working lives of women in 17th century England?

When you first open the 1657 edition of Resuscitatio your eye is almost immediately drawn to the full-page engraved portrait of Francis Bacon.  However, this book is part of the long history of women’s involvement in book production.

In early modern England, printing was mostly the preserve of men. However, widows were permitted to take over their late husbands’ printing businesses, which allowed many women a way into this profession. One of these women was Sarah Griffin, who was active as a printer from 1653 to 1673. We can see her involvement in the production of the 1657 edition of Resusciatio by taking a closer look at the title page.

The bottom of the title page for Resuscitatio reads: “LONDON, Printed by Sarah Griffin, for William Lee, and are to be sold at his Shop in Fleetsstreet, at the sign of the Turks-head, near the Mitre Tavern, 1657.”

Sarah Griffin inherited the printing business from her husband Edward in 1652 and ran it successfully for the next 20 years. We have several books printed by Sarah Griffin in our collection, including her edition of Resuscitatio.  

Hannah Allen was another example of a woman who acquired a business on her husband Benjamin’s death in 1632. While it is unclear how long she was involved in publishing, from 1646-1651 Allen published at least 54 books and pamphlets. Her business specialised in religious treatises, such as The hope of Israel. It is an English translation of a work by Menasseh ben Israel, who set up the first Hebrew printing press in Amsterdam.

Like the 1657 edition of Resuscitatio, a quick glance at The hope of Israel does not reveal an obvious connection to women-owned businesses. However, the bottom of the title page reads: “Printed at London by R.I. for Hannah Allen, at the Crown in Popes-head Alley, 1650.”

Our collection includes The hope of Israel and the 1648 pamphlet The humble ansvver of the General Councel of the Officers of the Arm.

Both of these items were identified as part of the Rare Books Liberating the Collections volunteer project, which equipped participants with the knowledge and tools to search our catalogue for items in our rare book collections relating to under-represented groups. Twenty-seven volunteers have worked with us, each focusing on a particular topic, such as books owned by women, authors of colour and representations of disability. Without the work of these volunteers, we may have never realised that Resuscitatio and The hope of Israel were part of the history of women in publishing and printing.

Both of these items were identified by Emilia Reid, a 2021 and 2022 Rare Books Liberating the Collections volunteer.

 

The New Curators Project is an annual programme run by UCL Special Collections and Newham Heritage Month. It offers 10 young adults in East London the chance to develop the skills and experience needed to start a career in the cultural heritage sector.

Apply now!

What is Cultural Heritage?

The cultural heritage field is an area of work focused on preserving history and culture and making it available to the general public. Among other things, it includes:

Museums.
Arts organisations and charities.
Libraries and Archives.
Historic Buildings and heritage sites.
Archaeology.

What will the project entail?

Successful applicants will receive training from industry experts in key areas such as:

Carrying out historical research.
Using archives.
Creating an exhibition.
Running events.
Communications in the cultural heritage sector.

Participants will gain real work experience by creating an exhibition for Newham Heritage Month using historical material from UCL Special Collections, the Archives and Local Studies Library in Stratford and beyond.

The programme also offers employment support such as advice on applying for jobs, writing applications and being interviewed.

Participants who attend all the workshops will receive up to £550.

Who can apply?

Applications are open to people who:

Are aged 18 to 24 at the time of making their application.
Are living, studying or working in Newham, Hackney, Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest.
Are not a university graduate or currently studying at university.
Have less than 6 months paid experience in the cultural heritage sector.

As this project is a part of Newham Heritage Month, there are 5 places available to individuals who live, work or study in the borough of Newham. The remaining 5 places are available to those who live, work or study in Tower Hamlets, Hackney or Waltham Forest.

When and where is it happening?

Workshops will be ‘in person’ on Tuesday evenings from 6pm to 8pm, beginning on March 7 2023 and ending June 27 2023. There will also be three full day workshops on Friday 31 March, Thursday 20 April and Friday 26 May.

Workshops will take place at the UCL’s brand new East London campus:

UCL East
One Pool Street
London
E20 2AF

Do applicants need to have any specific A Levels or GCSEs?

Absolutely not. We want to recruit participants who have a passion for local history, regardless of their qualifications.

How do I apply?

You can apply online via our online form. If you have difficulty using the form, please send us an email and we can find an alternative way for you to apply.

The application deadline is 8.00pm on Saturday 11 February 2023.

Delivered in partnership with Newham Heritage Month.

Our new online exhibition, Word as Art: Beauty in the Margins, is now open!

Writing is an essential part of everyday communication. It permeates every element of our society so that it is easy to forget its prevalence. Yet every time we put words down on a page or type them on a screen, we are creating a piece of art unique to us.

Our new online exhibition, Word as Art: Beauty in the Margins, explores the permeable borders between art and writing. We examine manuscripts, printing, textiles and objects that celebrate the way in which we have embellished the word, making it far more than just a means of communication.

In addition to items from the Library collections, the exhibition includes three pieces of art by students from the Slade School of Fine Art at UCL. Their interpretations of writing and communication demonstrate that the books, manuscripts, and letters of the past continue to inform and inspire creative practices of the present.

The inspiration for the exhibition is the Slade 150 anniversary year, celebrating fine art teaching and research since 1871.

The exhibition runs from October 2021-July 2022, with plans for a physical presence in the UCL Main Library from December 2021.

To find out more visit our exhibitions webpage.

The Outreach team at UCL Special Collections have been working hard on a new community collaboration with Newham Heritage Month – The New Curators Project. This project set out to provide 10 young people from East London the chance to develop the skills and experience needed to start a career in the cultural heritage sector. Successful applicants would receive a bursary, training from industry experts and they would create an exhibition and online event for a real-life audience as part of Newham Heritage Month in May 2021.

With funding from Foundation for Future London and UCL Culture, we ran two months of workshop featuring visiting facilitators (who delivered sessions on public history research, curatorship, digital communications and using archivers in historical research). We also worked with the cohort to devise an exhibition and online talk that used resources from (among others) Newham’s archive, UCL Special Collections and personal photography from participants. It was a whirlwind of activity, all leading to Newham Heritage Month programme this May.

While we felt confident that the partnership with Newham Heritage Month would be a hugely valuable one, and we knew the visiting facilitators would provide insightful, exciting presentations, we could not have anticipated how well the participants would work together or how good-natured and multi-talented a group they would be. It has been a pleasure to deliver.

This week, we were delighted to see the exhibition arrive at Stratford Library:

The exhibition will spend the rest of May travelling to eight other public libraries in Newham, and the group will be putting on a free public talk (online) on 28th May.

This is just the beginning for The New Curators Project, as we intend to run it annually. In time, we hope to see a growing alumni of past participants finding careers in the cultural heritage sector, and perhaps delivering content on future iterations of this project!

Contributing towards providing accessible pathways into the cultural heritage sector and demystifying roles within the field can sometimes seem an insurmountable task, especially when also trying to address the current lack of diversity in the sector. However, this is a practical step that will now take pride of place in our Outreach programme at UCL Special Collections.  At the same time, the project is an opportunity to strengthen a valuable community partnership with Newham Heritage Month and Newham’s public libraries.

UCL Special Collections is asking for submissions from current undergraduate and postgraduate students at The Slade School of Fine Art who would like to be included in an online exhibition with the working title ‘Word as Art.’ This exhibition will help highlight the historic artistry of the written word while connecting it to the present legacy of The Slade School of Fine Art. 

‘Word as Art’ is an exploration of the artistry that takes place whenever we make words physical. It includes manuscripts, printing, textiles and objects that celebrate the way we have embellished the word and make it more than just writing on a page. We are inviting students at The Slade School of Fine Art to join a collaborative exhibition of selected works from UCL Special Collections and contemporary arts works. We would like to see reflections on words and writing that challenge us to think about how writing reflects ourselves as much as the meaning of the word on the page. 

Three candidates will be selected for inclusion in UCL Special Collections Library Exhibition celebrating the artistic works present in UCL’s rare books and archives collection. It will be displayed online alongside rare books, manuscripts, and archival items. By being featured alongside items from UCL Special Collections it can help provide a new perspective on the exhibition themes as well as connect the artistry of the past to current practices.  

Due to Covid and space restrictions, artwork will be displayed online. Digital artworks are welcome, alongside photos and videos of physical or performative artworks. Currently there are no plans for a physical art display, but we will re-assess this on a case-by-case basis.  

The selected artists will receive a £100 prize for successful submissions and the opportunity to publish a brief statement about this work in the exhibition catalogue.  

If you would like to contribute, please send your artwork alongside a brief explanation (no more than 200 words) as to how your artwork ties into ‘Word as Art.’  

Deadline for submissions is midnight on May 31, 2021. We aim to reply to all applicants in mid June and the exhibition is expected to go live in September 2021. Please send your submissions to library.spec.coll.ed@ucl.ac.uk. 

How do you make a library? In our current exhibition in UCL’s Main Library, we suggest that all it takes is three basic ingredients: books; somewhere to keep the books; and people to read and look after the books. Nice and easy… right?

Of course, From Small Library Beginnings: A brief history of UCL Library Services very quickly shows us that it’s not that simple. Tracing UCL’s libraries back to the start of UCL itself, we find that a lack of funding meant that the planned Great Library was never built, and the very first library was named instead the Small Library – a diminutive start for a university library service that today supports over 40,000 students.

Buildings need to be built: it shouldn’t be surprising that they’re occasionally difficult to come by. But even at a university, people can be in short supply, too. Certainly, the library doesn’t seem to have ever lacked for users, and one never has to look far to see traces of past borrowers in the form of notes scribbled in the margins of textbooks*. However, staffing a library can be a different matter, and for some 40 years, until 1871, UCL dispensed with the role of Librarian entirely, employing only an assistant – sometimes. A lack of funding was once more to blame.

That only leaves books. Here, it seems, UCL has been more fortunate. From the beginning a large number of books were donated, bequeathed, gifted and even bought, so while they may not have had a home or been well looked after, they were at least available to be read…

…Until the London Blitz, anyway. The Second World War saw the most precious books and manuscripts in the library’s collections sent to the National Library of Wales for safekeeping. Of those left behind, an estimated 100,000 were lost or damaged when the university was hit during a 1940 air raid.

We’ve been careful to label the exhibition as a ‘brief’ history, and it would certainly be difficult to present a full narrative of the service’s 17 sites and almost 200 years of existence in just one display. But you’ll still find plenty of fascinating stories here: a library bell made from 17^th Century parts; the student life of famed librarian S. R. Ranganathan; the rise and fall of school libraries, and the impact of this on information literacy at universities.

For more on these stories and the items that tell them, download the exhibition catalogue, which includes an introduction by Anne Welsh from UCL’s own Department of Information Studies.

From Small Library Beginnings runs until Friday, 13 December in UCL Main Library, and is open to the public on weekdays, 9.30am-5pm.

*Marginalia can be fascinating and tell us a great deal about a book’s use and its previous owners. That being said, please don’t write in your library books.

My name is Ibolya Jurinka. I am spending 3 months in UCL Special Collections as an Erasmus+ intern. Erasmus+ is not only a student exchange programme; it also provides overseas opportunities for all employees wishing to gain practical learning experiences from partner organisations in higher education.

I come from Hungary. I have been working as a librarian at the University Library and Archives of the Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE).

I catalogue journals, especially retrospective cataloguing. I mostly work with materials from 19-20^th century, but I have also catalogued periodicals from 17-18^th century and also from the 21^st century. This summer I catalogued the oldest journals of our library with one of my specialist rare-book colleagues. These are from the 16^th century:

I like this work and find it interesting, so wanted to gain more experience in this area abroad. This autumn I am cataloguing Little Magazines here at UCL Special Collections, and I have organized an exhibition about the most interesting magazines.

Little Magazines Collection

Basic information about Little Magazines

(source: SOAR, Geoffrey: Little Magazines at University College London)

‘Little Magazines are those that publish creative, often innovative work, with little or no regard for commercial gain. They sometimes have very small print runs and may last for relatively few issues. Most of them are from 1960s-1970s. The library of University College London started to collect Little Magazines from 1964’. It is a subsection of Small Press Collection.

Most of the Little Magazines are literary journals; they focus especially on modern, 20^th century poetry and prose.

We can find colourful art magazines too in the Little Magazines Collection:

Cataloguing of Little Magazines

Cataloguing of little magazines is hard, because:

• volume numbers and dates are often absent;
• it is often hard to tell if a magazine is current or not;
• many are published irregularly and often at widely spaced intervals;
• many do not appear in official current bibliographies;
• they are often visual and it is hard to identify the title.

Visual Poetry in the Little Magazines exhibition, Main Library Donaldson stairs

Some of the Little Magazines contain visual and concrete poetry. This type of poetry appeared in the 20^th century and became very popular. The exhibition focuses on little magazines containing visual poetry, whose title begins with the letter ‘A’. If you are interested in this exhibition, you can visit it from 24th October 2019 to 11th of December 2019 in the Main Library, either side of the stairs to the Donaldson Library. For more information, see the leaflets next to the exhibition cases.

 

28^th June 2019 marks the end of a Heritage Lottery Funded project between UCL Special Collections and Newham libraries, Archives and Local Studies Library.

We have been working for a year and a half on developing new collaborative exhibitions, creating a collection of oral history interviews and developing a programme to enable local people in Newham to be a part of the project.

It’s been a busy, bustling, fun filled project and we’re so proud of the result; two exhibitions, 30 hours’ plus of workshops and interviews with 103 participants and 11 oral history interviews.

You can hear the interviews here, but if you would just like to get a feel for the project, why not watch our animated video, which uses clips from the interviews and images from the collaborative exhibition Making East London (which uses UCL Special Collections and Newham Archives and Local Studies Library items):

We have ambitions for further collaborative projects with Newham Libraries and with other community organisations in the four neighbouring boroughs of the Olympic Park as we continue to lay the foundations for a full and far-reaching engagement programme.  Watch this space!

Have you ever wondered whether our Rare Books team have favourite items, or with what kind of mysteries our archivists are grappling? Or perhaps you’ve hoped to catch a glimpse of one of our unique and beautiful manuscripts? Then Special Collections Presents… is the event for you!

We are pleased to announce that UCL Special Collections will be running our annual ‘open day’, Special Collections Presents…, as part of UCL’s Festival of Culture on June 5th 2019. This popular event is free and open to all.

We will be presenting a wide selection of items from the collections in half hour slots.  Visitors can choose an area of interest and book a free slot.

Visitors will be able to choose between a varied programme of displays that showcase many areas of interest and research:

• Geography textbooks from the 18^th and 19^th century from the UCL Institute of Education Library
• Works from the fascinating Ogden collection, whose recent cataloguing has revealed a wealth of hidden detail lurking behind their respectable titles (these item were part of Charles Kay Ogden’s private library, described in his own words as presenting “semantics, meaning, word magic…sign systems, symbol systems and non-verbal notations…universal language, translation and simplification”)
• Items displaying UCL’s own students’ voices from the past; student magazines, debating society minutes, petitions and more from the College Archive
• Treasures of print, including some famous publications; a rare and very early King James I Bible (1612), Hooke’s Micrographia (1667) and Chertsey’s The crafte to lyve well and to dye well (published in 1505 by Wynkyn de Worde who was known for his work with William Caxton)
• Marking the launch of a new online catalogue, items from the recently catalogued Alex Comfort Papers will be on display (Comfort was a writer, Director of research in Gerontology in the Zoology department at UCL in the 1960s and ‘70s, an activist in many areas including nuclear disarmament – perhaps best known as the author of the cult publication The Joy of Sex).
• Items exploring alternative youth movements from the Forest School Camp and the Woodcraft Folk archives, held at UCL Institute of Education
• A collection of archival items from the Huguenot Library that provide unique insight into the lives of Huguenot immigrants and refugees in the 17^th and 18^th
• Autograph letters from 19th and 20th century writers; tales of success, failure and domestic life.  Among others, this will include Dickens, Orwell, T S Eliot, Graham Greene, Iris Murdoch, Radclyffe Hall.

 

This event is open to all – but especially the curious…

Book your free ticket.