The John Rylands Library was founded in 1900 and since 1972 it has been the home of The University of Manchester Library’s astonishingly rich and diverse special collections of rare books, manuscripts, archives and visual materials. It is truly one of the great libraries of the world. The John Rylands Research Institute was established in 2013 as a partnership between the Library and the Faculty of Humanities to encourage research using the Library’s unique collections.

This partnership is now moving to another level, led by Professor Hannah Barker, Director of the John Rylands Research Institute, and Professor Christopher Pressler, John Rylands University Librarian.

The John Rylands Research Institute and Library (Rylands for short) will be a dynamic community of world-leading researchers, librarians, curators, archivists, conservators and imaging specialists, all dedicated to working together to open the collections up to innovative and multidisciplinary research and engaging wider audiences in that research. Its mission is to define the human experience over five millennia and up to the current day. 

The Rylands acts as a catalyst and focus for the world-leading research of the University, with the aim of drawing the best minds to Manchester and establishing it as one of the great centres for the study of textual, material and visual cultures. The research incorporates new approaches in digital humanities and curation, as well as scientific techniques in the study and conservation of heritage materials.

Professor Christopher Pressler, John Rylands University Librarian and Director of The University of Manchester Library, said: “The Rylands is one of the undisputed great libraries of the world. The John Rylands Research Institute and Library is well positioned to realise the tremendous potential of the special collections to support world-class research, learning and public engagement with research, throughout the University.”

Professor Hannah Barker, Director of the John Rylands Research Institute, said: “Thanks to the combined efforts of the Institute and the Library we are revitalising the Rylands as a catalyst for outstanding research across the humanities and sciences.”

• Visit the new Rylands website

The Order a Book service is free; the Order an Article service incurs a £2 administration charge.

Both services are available to staff and students. Find out more here:

• Order resources

The series is called Opening Remarks and is hosted by Clare Liggins and Steve Carlton. The first episode focusses on research data management and invites Dr Eleanor Warren, Chris Gibson and Bill Ayres to discuss the topic.

Steve Carlton explained: “The idea behind Opening Remarks is simple – we want to have conversations with colleagues from across the University about open research; how open research is supported and facilitated, but also how researchers embed open principles in their practice. We want these conversations to be informal, interesting and informative.”

The Research Services team are inviting researchers from across the University to get involved with the series.

Clare Liggins added: “Our intention is to record six episodes in this initial series, covering research data, open access, research communications, metrics and lots more besides. We’d been keen to hear from researchers about what they think we should be talking about.”

The first episode is available on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify and Google Podcasts.

You can contact the Library’s Research Services team on Twitter at @UoMLibResearch or email them at researchdata@manchester.ac.uk

The materials are from a collection that was originally part of the private library of the Earls of Crawford. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the 26th Earl made a number of purchases at auction to build up the collection. In the first half of the twentieth century his son then gifted (although some items were a semi-permanent loan) them to The John Rylands Library. This collection is a fantastically rich resource for the study of France and its traditions.

This digitised collection originated from a project funded by The John Rylands Research Institute. The project was directed by Professor Bertrand Taithe with research by Dr Alexander Fairfax-Chomeley. They focussed on a collection of over 10,000 proclamations and broadsides, now categorised as the European Proclamations and Broadsides Collection. The collection spans a period from c1530 to 1890 and covers much of the European continent.

We invite you to explore the collection, available now on Manchester Digital Collections.

For more insight visit The John Rylands Special Collections blog.

A new digital collection, containing key works of Middle English literature, has been added to our Manchester Digital Collections platform, making them available to anyone online.

As well as being landmark literary texts, the items contain some wonderful illustrations, such as the delicate use of gold leaf on the “Wheel of Fortune” illumination shown here.

These incredible manuscripts will be of paramount importance to a wide variety of subject areas, including literature, history, theology, linguistics and art history.

The collection includes such works as the Canterbury Tales and John Lydgate‘s two major poems; the incredibly beautiful, richly illuminated Troy Book and a deluxe copy of Fall of Princes.

There are also several copies of the Brut chronicle the medieval history of England, ranging in date from the mid-14th century to the second half of the 15th.

Further notable works include numerous copies of the New Testament, translated into English by John Wycliffe the fourteenth-century radical and church reformer. Alongside these are other devotional texts meditating on the life of Christ and The Pricke of Conscience, a work traditionally attributed to the mystic Richard Rolle de Hampole.

Other interesting and unusual highlights include a multi-language legal commonplace book and medical texts such as On Urines, plus a rare late 14th-century copy of the Forme of Cury (‘proper method of cookery’), a recipe book compiled by the master cook of Richard II.

These items were initially digitised as part of a Jisc funded project called In the Bigynnyng.

You can view these items, along with other incredible collections, now via Manchester Digital Collections.

Love Data Week

• DMP Writing Hour - Monday, 10 February, 1-2pm
• Research File Management - Tuesday, 11 February, 2-3.30pm
• RDM Drop in: ask us anything – Wednesday, 12 February, 3-4.30pm

No booking required for this session, just turn up with your research data management questions. We will also have some of our research data management games set out to try. Come and see what Lego has to do with metadata, and play our file organisation game. Tea, coffee and biscuits will be available.

If you can’t make it to one of our sessions then we will also be releasing a podcast, blog post and several 60 second videos about creating your Data Management Plan using DMPonline. Keep an eye on our Twitter account for details @UoMLibResearch

(Image: "About data" by Mot Studio is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

• View Manchester Digital Collections

Research opportunities

Manchester Digital Collections allows University of Manchester academics to curate digital editions of important items from the collections, contextualising them and bringing their research on the collections to a wider audience.

Manchester Digital Collections is launching today with the following collections:

• Hebrew Manuscripts
• Latin Manuscripts
• Maps
• Manchester Museum
• Mary Hamilton Papers
• Persian Manuscripts
• Peterloo
• Petrarch
• The Whitworth

A cross-institutional collaboration

The image viewer has been led by Dr Guyda Armstrong, Faculty Lead for Digital Humanities, in close collaboration with:

• Cambridge University Library,
• The University of Manchester Library,
• The John Rylands Research Institute,
• IT Services,
• The School of Arts, Languages and Cultures,
• Manchester Museum, and
• The Whitworth.

Access to email archives is fraught with technical, legal and ethical issues. As a result, many contemporary writers risk falling off a 'digital cliff': drafts of their works and email correspondence with fellow authors, publishers and critics may soon be unreadable. Even when libraries are able to preserve these records, access is restricted by issues of data protection and confidentiality.

These issues will be tackled using the funding for the Palladium project (Providing Access to Large Literary Archives in a Digital Medium). The project has been awarded over £87,000 from Arts Council England’s Designation Development Fund to address these challenges.

The focus of the project will be the archive of Carcanet Press, a Manchester-based poetry publisher, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2019. The University of Manchester Library’s Special Collections holds the archives of Carcanet Press and the project will explore ways to provide literary scholars and other audiences with access to 350,000 emails within their archive.

The project will ensure the long-term, sustainable preservation and management of these extraordinary research resources, and develop innovative means of access to them for a wide range of audiences.

It will also explore the potential for email archives to support new areas of digital scholarship, such as data visualisations, and it will invite creative responses from artists and writers.

Petrarch is most well known as a poet but he was also a prolific scholar, and is often cited as the “father of humanism”. He was an extremely influential figure at the beginning of the Renaissance, and his works were instrumental in the formation of the modern Italian language.

The project focussed on material produced in Italy between 1350 and 1650 that examined or provided a commentary on Petrarch’s works, cataloguing more than 400 individual manuscripts and 300 early printed books. They illustrate the incredible impact of Petrarch’s poetry during his life and for hundreds of years afterwards.

Dr Guyda Armstrong and Julianne Simpson led on the project’s online digital library. This library encompasses approximately 84 works housed in The John Rylands Library and 14 further editions from the Special Collections of the Hesburgh Library at the University of Notre Dame, USA.

The digital library, which is available to anyone via Manchester Digital Collections, presents not only images of digitised books and other items but interpretation providing the viewer with interesting insights.

It is hoped that the project will open up new directions for research around one of Italy’s best-known medieval poets.

The digitised works can be viewed online now, via Manchester Digital Collections.

It’s a chance for you to have your say and tell us about your experience of the Library. Your feedback is important as it helps us improve our facilities and services.

Take our short, 10-15 minute survey.

In return for your feedback you’ll be in with a chance of winning reusable coffee cups, free coffee vouchers and a £100 Amazon gift card.

The Black Thought & Culture and African Diaspora: 1860-Present databases contain a wealth of unique material ranging from immigration records, civil rights documentation and hard to find material from key African American and African diaspora thinkers. The two databases will be spotlighted as Featured databases on the Library website to coincide with October’s Black History Month.

They are indicative of the Library’s ongoing commitment to diversifying the range of primary resources available to the University. In this particular instance they also form part of our response to a key recommendation in the recent Royal Historical Society’s Report on Race, Ethnicity and Equality: to recognise and address "the imperative need to widen taught History curriculums in schools and universities to challenge the racial foundations of the discipline and to reflect the full diversity of human histories."

Look out too for updates on social media by @uomlibrary and @uomlib_ian on Twitter.

The Library is committed to making Open Access as easy as possible for researchers and so provides a range of support services. This year, we will be holding four events during Open Access Week for postgraduate researchers and academics. Don’t miss the opportunity to speak with our experts, find out about the benefits of Open Access and how we can support you to make your work openly available.

Choosing a Credible Journal: And how to avoid ‘Predatory Publishers’

12 - 1pm, Tuesday, 22 October 2019

Main Library, Ground Floor Seminar RoomJoin this new workshop to find out how to decide where to submit your work for publication. Learn how to assess a journal using established criteria, and make sure you avoid publishing with so-called ‘predatory publishers’.

• Book your place here

Open Research Showcase

1.30 - 3.30pm, Wednesday, 23 October 2019

Roscoe Building, Foyer

Join the Library’s Open Access experts to find out more about making your research openly available. Enjoy a hot drink and a cake, help to increase the visibility of the University’s research in our Wikipedia edit-a-thon and play some Open Access games.

This is a drop-in session, so just come along whenever you can.

• Register your interest on Facebook

Open Access in Five Simple Steps

12 - 1pm, Thursday, 24 October 2019

Main Library, Ground Floor Seminar Room

Find out more about Open Access in the Library’s bite-sized workshop for staff and postgraduate researchers. Learn about the most appropriate Open Access method for your work and how to be compliant with institutional and funder Open Access requirements.

• Book your place here

Open Access Week AMA

All day, Friday, 25 October 2019

Twitter: @UoMLibResearch

The Library’s Open Access experts will be answering your questions about Open Access, open research data and much more on Twitter. Follow @UoMLibResearch and use the hashtag #OAWeekAMA to ask your questions.

For more information contact the Library’s Open Access team uml.openaccess@manchester.ac.uk

• Open Access for research outputs

Whilst the space has always housed maps, it is the first time it is being treated as a Special Collections Reading Room, which means staff will be available during the week to help with map enquiries. It also means that the area is reserved for customers consulting maps and special material. To protect the collections, food and drink are not allowed in this area (even bottled water).

The trial service will run from today, 30 September for three months, and will include provision for teaching workshops and other enhanced study for those engaging with our map collections.

Staff will be on hand to help on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays from 9.30am to 12.30pm and 1.30 to 4.30pm. Appointments to view maps must be made in advance.

If you have any questions, feedback on the service, or wish to make an appointment, email: uml.maps@manchester.ac.uk

Based on data gathered from multiple sources, each report is tailored to a specific school, department or division and delivers diverse and detailed analyses of individual research areas. The reports will support staff with nuanced evaluation, such as assessing the citation performance of particular disciplines, as well as targeted competitor analysis and the identification of potential future collaborations and interdisciplinary research opportunities.

The reports will be published twice a year, and are accompanied by a series of how-to guides that explain how to interpret the report data responsibly.

While the new reports will likely reveal many previously unknown insights into the University’s research activity, they may also generate new questions. In this event, the Library’s Research Metrics team are on hand to provide bespoke research analysis.

The Reading Room will be closed entirely on Monday 1 and Tuesday 2 July. However, from 3 July until the completion of the work, the service will be offered from the Christie Room on the first floor of the historic part of The John Rylands Library to ensure minimum disruption.

The refurbishment will offer improvements to the reader experience together with enhanced security and care of the collections through a redesigned staff workspace.

About the Reading Room

The room, located on the fourth floor of our Deansgate site, is an air conditioned, quiet space where anyone can register to access items from our world class Special Collections.

Christie Room interim arrangement

Services and routes throughout the building may alter at various times during the refurbishment so please do check the Special Collections Reading Room webpages for any updates ahead of your visit.

You can see some artist's impressions of the new Reading Room above, and view a 360° panorama of the room.

Further details

For more information, contact Dominic Marsh, Project Co-ordinator.

Dr Nicola Grayson from the Library's Learning Development Team reveals how the Library played a key role.

Background

Due to the impressive reputation of the My Learning Essentials team and our excellent resources, the Library was approached by the University’s Widening Participation and Recruitment team to contribute to a HEFCE funded project. The project is designed to promote progression to postgraduate study for minority groups and those from disadvantaged areas.

The project is led by the University of Leeds but includes: The University of Manchester, Newcastle University, The University of Sheffield, the University of Warwick, and the University of York and this blog post will detail how the University of Manchester Library was involved.

The project

The project has two strands:

• The delivery of face-to-face skills support to third year undergraduate students in Biology, Economics and English to encourage progression to postgraduate study.
• The development of an online course targeted at offer holding postgraduate students who fall within the groups identified above.

A previous HEFCE project in 2014/15 called ‘Widening Access to Postgraduate Study and Fair Access to the Professions’ had found that master’s degrees could lead to higher earnings, provide access to certain professions and encourage and enable progression to postgraduate research.

The groups targeted by the current project have lower levels of take-up to postgraduate study and the limited research that’s available points to some influencing factors e.g. difficulty in the mastery of key skills or academic practices and the prevalence of processes that don’t take into account individual knowledge and skills.

The Library worked on both strands of the HEFCE project and members of staff from our Learning Development, Teaching and Learning, E-learning, Customer Service and Student teams were all involved in putting together the online and face-to-face support.

Face to face and online

We developed skills workshops that were tailored to studying biology, economics and English called ‘Think like a Postgrad’. These workshops focused on supporting students with the enhancement and development of reading, note-taking, academic writing and time-management skills.

The online course, called ‘Prepare for Postgrad’, is comprised of a series of modules. Each institution worked on a separate module within set parameters so that when packaged together the modules formed one extended programme of support for offer holding postgraduate students.

The online course features introductory modules that were designed to welcome students and enable them to feel supported and prepared. It also includes personal effectiveness modules, that focus on managing time, building resilience and cultivating wellbeing, as well as academic confidence modules which detail how to take control of your learning, how to read effectively and how to write with confidence. The University of Manchester Library developed the writing with confidence module.

Modules

We had to align our module with the effective reading module and produce content suitable for postgraduate level study. We also had to ensure that we used a variety of different media (podcasts, quizzes and video) to engage the students and that no institution specific branding or references were included as the course needed to be appropriate for each of the participating institutions to host and run.

We organised our module to focus on assisting students with:

• Breaking down the question and organising ideas
• Developing effective writing habits
• Developing writing confidence

It was a lot of work to put the face-to-face and online support together and we had to do so with a very quick turnaround time; all those who contributed to this project did so in addition to their normal daily duties.

However, it is important that we at the Library continue to demonstrate our value as a centre for pedagogical expertise and the area of widening access to postgraduate study for any and all students is a worthy area in which to make a positive contribution to further research and promote inclusion.

Dr Nicola Grayson - Learning Development Team

Collecting institutions like the University of Manchester Library are increasingly facing the challenge of preserving 'born digital' material when acquiring recent and contemporary archives.

One of the most important modern archives held by the Library is that of Carcanet Press, one of the UK’s premier poetry publishing houses. Correspondence with poets, critics, editors, translators and artists is a key element of this archive and provides a rich resource for researchers. Most of this correspondence is now conducted by email.

This JISC-funded project aims to tackle the challenge of capturing and preserving the email archive of Carcanet Press.

Basing its work on traditional archival practice and digital preservation standards, the project is using this email archive as a test-bed for practical digital preservation.

The project will test and assess existing tools for metadata extraction, validation, migration, packaging and ingest. Different long-term preservation formats for email will also be explored.

The project team is developing documentation and workflows which can be adapted so that the JRUL is well-placed to deal with similar born-digital archives in the future.

Read the final project report.

Manchester Histories Festival is back for its third biennial festival, providing you with the opportunity to learn, discover and interpret histories from across the city.

'Great Women of Manchester' Collection encounters will explore the story behind a selection of rare items from The John Rylands Library's women's history collections. A hand-written manuscript from Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell will be displayed, as will a letter from renowned suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst to C.P. Scott, former editor of the Manchester Guardian.

The Guardian Archive will be the focus of our presence at Manchester Histories Festival’s Celebration Day. The archive is one of the Library’s most significant collections, depicting the newspaper’s key place in the city’s rich history of campaigns for social and political reform. Visitors to the stand will be invited to examine the photographs uncovered from this archive in the hope to identify some of the staff, locations, occupations and machinery captured in the images.

Manchester Histories Festival runs from Friday, 3 June to Sunday, 12 June 2016. Collection encounters will take place on 8 and 10 June at The John Rylands Library. Manchester Histories Festival's Celebration Day is on 11 June at Manchester Town Hall, 10am to 4pm. All events are free to attend, just turn up.

Keep an eye on the Library’s Twitter and Facebook accounts for a glimpse into the Guardian Archives and a preview of the Collection encounter items.

The John Rylands Library is part of Manchester Histories Festival’s, Manchester Celebration Day 2016 taking place across Manchester Town Hall and Central Library from 10:30-4pm on Saturday 11 June. Bringing together nearly 100 histories and heritage organisations from across Greater Manchester, the Manchester Celebration Day will have something for all the family, including exhibition stands, games, heritage bus rides, craft activities, film screenings, performances and talks.

The newspaper collection, currently housed in The University of Manchester Library, was captured using high quality scanners equipped with ultra-sonic, double feed detection, automated colour detection and image processing applications. The images were then formatted to a high quality and are accessible across all digital devices.

Nashriyah: digital Iranian history, which was funded by The University of Manchester Library, forms the first steps in building a comprehensive digital archive chronicling these periods of modern Iranian history, events that have shaped Iran’s turbulent relations with the West and continue to resonate to this day.

Dr Siavush Randjbar-Daemi, a lecturer in Iranian history, said:

An early example of scientific outreach, these ground-breaking 'Penny Lectures' were delivered to packed audiences in Manchester during the 1860s and 1870s. Initiated by noted chemist Henry Roscoe, topics ranged from epidemic delusions to spectrum analysis and the indestructability of matter.

Often quirkily illustrated, the lectures helped to popularise science and raise the profile of Manchester as a hub of scientific and technological progress. They were praised at the time by leading scientific journal Nature for making science accessible to the general public: "Many of the lectures are so fascinating that it is difficult to put the volumes aside….whilst within the comprehension of all classes, they will also be found not unworthy of perusal by men of culture."

Professor Danielle George MBE, Associate Dean of Teaching & Learning at The University of Manchester, said:

Using 21st-century digital technology to open up its archives, The University of Manchester Library is giving a new lease of life to cutting-edge science of the past and inspiring scientists of the future. Science and technology have a huge impact on every aspect of our day to day lives. By shedding light on Manchester’s pioneering contribution to scientific education in the past, the University is highlighting its current international prowess and its pivotal role in years to come.

The lectures can be accessed at www.manchester.ac.uk/library/science-lectures.

A team from The University of Manchester used state of the art facial measuring software and more traditional provenance research to authenticate the silhouette which is owned by the descendants of the Gaskell family.

Following their research, medical artist Ray Evans and Stella Halkyard, visual collections manager at The University of Manchester Library, now admit that whilst they can never confirm the silhouette’s authenticity irrefutably, they say it is very likely to be of Gaskell.

Ms Halkyard said: 

Mr Evans analysed the two images using scientific facial comparison methods and found that the facial proportions and morphology of the face of the person represented were virtually identical.

He says his results were “consistent across the two images” and that “putting all this evidence together makes it likely that the two images portray the same person and that person is very likely to be Elizabeth Gaskell.”

Both images are being made available from 12 November via the world’s largest online collection of Elizabeth Gaskell works. The collection was digitised earlier this year by the University’s Library which used cutting edge technology to digitise selected works from their internationally renowned Gaskell collection.

Building a graphene archive

Professor Sir Kostya Novoselov has donated his analogue archive, comprising ten laboratory notebooks to The University of Manchester Library. These notebooks will form the basis of an ongoing archive which we intend to grow as a major resource for researchers and to preserve the legacy of this ongoing work.

In addition to this archive we will continue to develop our great collection of historical scientific books. In 2014, we purchased Conrad Gessner’s work on fossils, gems and stones. Published in 1565, it includes the earliest reference to the use of graphite for pencils.

Watch an interview John Hodgson, Manuscripts and Archives Manager and Julianne Simpson, Rare Books and Maps Manager on Gessner’s book:

Conservation

We are working with academics and students from a number of departments across the University to explore the potential uses of graphene in conservation.

Two postgraduate research students have recently undertaken laboratory testing of various properties of graphene in this context; such as its ability to act as a moisture/gas barrier, its UV-screening capabilities, and its anti-static properties.

Disseminating graphene research

Manchester eScholar offers a set of services to store, manage, and disseminate scholarly work on the web.

The Library has partnered with the National Graphene Institute to develop an eScholar feed that automatically populates and updates graphene publication lists on an hourly basis.

This work both significantly benefits the graphene research community at The University of Manchester through rapid dissemination of its work and provides the international graphene community with instant access to the latest ground-breaking research in this field.

View the latest list of publications on the National Graphene Institute website.