The first week in February has been a busy week for the Archives and Special Collections department!

Firstly, we welcome two new members of staff. Kelda Roe has been appointed for twelve months as the Rugby Football League Collections Access Officer, as a result of our successful National Cataloguing Grant Scheme application, and Harriet Notman begins a six month part time contract as an Archive Assistant. You’ll learn more about them in next week’s blog once they’ve had chance to settle in!

We also seem to be welcoming lots of researchers on site at the moment, from both inside and outside the university. You can read just how easy it is to carry out archive research through English graduate Steven Jackson’s blog posts. He is currently assisting the History department with some research into the University (or technical college as it was then known) during the First World War and this was his first time finding and using archival material. Read about his experiences in his first and second blog posts.

Finally, this week has also seen the acquisition of a new archive collection. Duncan Scott completed his PhD with Bristol in 1972, considering the impact of ethnic minorities in local politics within the Kirklees area in the late 1960s/early 1970s. His unique research includes summaries of the many interviews he conducted with members of the local community (under pseudonyms), his field notes, political publicity material and newspaper clippings following local political events and developments in a time of cultural change. Covering a wide spectrum of political opinion from Communism to the National Front, and the views of community members from a number of cultural backgrounds. This snapshot of life in the area forty years will shortly be illustrated by a set of photographs Duncan is also intending to deposit with us.