A New Year’s Eve Ghost Story
This Christmas we bring you a spine-chilling ritual for conjuring spirits from the margins of a medieval manuscript that features in our current Curious Cures […]
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A game of stones – how Cambridge acquired a cast of the Rosetta Stone
Exactly two hundred years ago, in 1822, the French scholar Jean-Francois Champollion (1790–1832) succeeded in his attempts to decipher the hieroglyphic text of the famous Rosetta […]
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Work experience in the archives
A guest post by Lucy Graham. For the last three weeks, I have been lucky enough to explore daily life behind the scenes in the […]
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Statutory safety: rebinding the Proctors’ Books
Historic volumes from outside the the University Library, intrinsic to University ceremonial, have been recent visitors to the Conservation Studio. These two books contain the […]
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Conservation of a Bound Volume of Letters from the Darwin Archive
This volume was kindly donated to the Library in 2018 and comprises 80 letters all of which were sent to William Kemp, an amateur geologist, […]
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Universal Joy: The Grand Festival at Yarmouth, 19 April 1814
A post by Samantha Evans (Darwin Correspondence Project). The library recently acquired a substantial part of the Paget family archive as a gift from Sir […]
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Mould damage and suction wedges: conservation of felted paper in a bound iron-gall ink manuscript
Every conservation treatment we undertake at the University Library is done with the specifics of the collection item in mind. We consider the materiality of […]
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Turning over a new leaf: Fasciculing fragile letters and plant specimens in the Darwin Archive
The Darwin Archive contains a wide variety of loose sheet papers, often in diverse formats and frequently found in specific combinations. Letters are kept together […]
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‘Ruby, who worked with Prof Hopkins’: papers of Ruby Leader, Animal Technician in the Department of Biochemistry
Biochemistry is particularly strongly represented in the University Library’s modern science archive holdings. The Department of Archives and Modern Manuscripts holds the personal paper collections of a number […]
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Conservation of three volumes in the Cambridge University Press Archive
Imagine having to file your financial year-end invoices in one of these mammoth volumes! The Cambridge University Press Archive contains three oversize ‘stationery’ bindings that […]
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