Buildings across the University campus will be closed from 07:30 – 14:00 BST on Sunday 26th July 2015.
Our colleagues in Estates will be undertaking essential maintenance of the electrical distribution on campus, and buildings will be closed to ensure everyone’s safety.
Last week we discovered all roads really do lead to the canal network as we held the official handover of the Mikron Theatre Company archive into Heritage Quay! The acquisition of the Mikron archive has been almost four years in the making, from a number of coffee shop chats in its hometown of Marsden between producer Peter Toon and Huddersfield academic Heather Norris Nicholson, to the transfer of over 60 boxes of material into the University of Huddersfield Archives in March 2015.
We’re often asked how we acquire collections, and whilst many depositors approach us directly, and on occasion we might approach a potential depositor, it’s far more usual for us to hear about potential acquisitions through word of mouth. Colleagues and users of the archive service will often flag up our existence to those perhaps considering depositing an archive (or those who have never considered it but wish they had somewhere safe to keep their collection!), but with no prior experience of the process or potential of depositing a collection with a professionally run archive service.
In the case of a University archive service, it is often through the connections made by our academics that we are made aware of these potential depositors. It was through Dr Norris Nicholson’s initial discussions into the contents of the archive during 2011 and 2012, and her discovery of the potential for research amongst students and academics from a number of arts disciplines that a new home at the University Archive Service began to take shape. A modern theatre company for whom travelling was a large and integral element of their day to day life, the practical advantages to Mikron of being able to regain office space, alongside the desire to be able to make parts of their fascinating history available to fans and researchers alike made the possibility of the archive’s move a serious prospect.
But Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither is the transfer arrangements for an archive collection! It often takes months to arrange the practical and legal elements of a deposit. The HLF funding to move the archive service to a new facility gave the idea of the deposit both a boost (considering Heritage Quay’s new location looking out onto the Huddersfield Narrow Canal and Mikron’s long connections with waterways in general) and created a delay. It was decided best to move the material once the centre was complete and the existing collections had been transferred into the new repository.
But on a rather cloudy March morning in 2015, the Mikron archive left its home at the Marsden Mechanics for the last time, to be catalogued, repackaged and stored in the new state of the art facilities at Heritage Quay. During the official handover on the 30th June, Dr Nicholson (Visiting Researcher, University of Huddersfield), Peter Toon (Producer, Mikron) and Marianne McNamara (Artistic Director, Mikron) came to look over some of the transferred material and examine the new repository. Peter and Marianne were excited about the prospect of not only the material becoming accessible to a whole new audience of users, but the potential for them to be able to use and re-visit material from the past. Mikron has one of the longest independent theatre ‘Friends’ group in the UK, which will celebrate it’s 30th anniversary in 2016, and some of the very first newsletters from the 1980s were on display during the handover.
Dr Nicholson pointed out the relevance of the programme and poster collections in charting the history of design and colour choice for Art and Design students. She also discussed an extensive set of oral histories conducted with those living and working on the barges in the early 20th century, which told not only the history of the waterways, but that of a entire culture of ‘bargee’ people who are now represented by only a few descendants keeping traditions alive. As the vinyl, audio tape, programmes, photos, administrative and textile contents of the archive were reviewed, Dr Nicholson concluded the strength of the Mikron collection lay in the diverse range of formats it encompassed, which had appeal to students across the arts and humanities disciplines, and the potential for inter-disciplinary and funded research projects in the future.
So the Mikron collection is now safely on the shelves in its new home, and we hope to have it catalogued shortly. The collection will then be searchable in the online catalogue at heritagequay.org, and also in the lists we upload to portals like the Archives Hub and Archives Portal Europe.
Whilst we hope to welcome many students and academics in to conduct research, we also look forward to sharing the contents of the archive with Mikron’s Friends and the local community. We hope if you visit Heritage Quay in the near future, you too will find all roads lead to the canal!
Read the University’s press release here and find details of Mikron’s show One of Each at Heritage Quay on 8th October 2015 here.
Unfortunately due to important IT maintenance work, both the the Heritage Quay online catalogue (www.heritagequay.org/archives) and the History to Herstory website (www.historytoherstory.org.uk) will be unavailable from Tuesday 14th July 16:30 BST until Wednesday 15th July at around 10:00 BST, please accept our apologies for any inconvenience that this may cause.
Last week our parent department Computing and Library Services held its first ever awards ceremony. After an exceptionally busy year of opening Heritage Quay, moving in, completing the catalogue for around 50% of the collections, developing events and other programming, and all the other things going on in our lives, I was really proud that the team were the runners up as the Team of the Year! Our amazing colleagues in the Admin Office who keep the whole department running smoothly were the well-deserved winners.
Harriet, one of our two Archives Assistants, was also the runner up in the Best Customer Service category – any of our users who visit the searchroom or use our enquiry services will have encountered our friendly and helpful Assistants. As a team we try to be responsive to the needs of our users – so if we got something wrong for you (or did something right!) please take the opportunity to let us know so that we can resolve it.
The Heritage Quay Listening Room is now open for researchers to explore over 90 years of music and sounds recordings from the archive!
Heritage Quay Listening Room
Music forms one of the most important strengths of the Heritage Quay collections and this is reflected by the sheer volume of audio recordings found within the archive. The British Music Collection itself contains over 21,000 individual recordings of 20th and 21st century British classical/art music, and the archive also holds extensive collections of sound recordings that relate to viol music, jazz, and the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival hcmf//.
The volume and diversity of the recordings is also reflected by the variety of different audio formats that the recordings are stored on. The Heritage Quay Listening Room has been equipped with a range of professional playback and digitisation equipment to enable the long term access of these vital records into the future, regardless of format.
Analogue vinyl and audio cassette formats can be played and digitised to ensure preservation and to promote access
Access to the audio and written records of a collection allows us to get even closer to the subject; not just seeing/touching history but hearing it too!
The Listening Room is open to researchers during search room opening hours. Details about visiting the service can be found here.
Today is the first day our new searchroom is open to researchers in Heritage Quay (our exploration space is sort of unofficially open, as our first exhibition is not installed until Wednesday). We’ve already had a number of bookings from people eager to jump back into researching our collections, and as ever, Rugby League and our political and music collections are proving popular with early researchers.
Our first researcher has in fact come from the other side of the world to look at the RFL archive! Has has not, of course, come specifically just to look at our archive (however important and exciting we believe ourselves to be!), it happens to be a happy coincidence that we have opened in time for him to visit us before he goes back to New Zealand. David Colquhoun is an historian who is writing a biography of New Zealand born rugby player, and successful all-round sportsman George Smith, and is doing research in archives across the North of England as part of his biography project. You can read more about this on his blog which is linked above. As he has a background working in libraries and archives, we’ve been grateful for his patience and professional understanding during our first morning!
We’ve already got a number of appointments booked in over the next couple of weeks and have had a few people walk in to the searchroom to make inquiries about collections which is great news as it seems the word about Heritage Quay is already spreading. This week is a bit of a soft opening as we work through our teething troubles and test our procedures, but if you’d like to see us up and running with the big curvy screen, multi-touch tables and fully installed, student-curated exhibition on the history of the university then please do pop in anytime from Tuesday 21st October. If you’d like to speak to one of the Archivists just pop into the searchroom and ask us, and we’d be happy to help!
I was able to make a site visit to Heritage Quay last week. The end is in sight I think! – a lot has changed since I was last on site in June.
