The University of Hull will be 100 years old in 2027!
In summer 2023, Hull University Archives began an ambitious project to catalogue records created by the University during its century-long existence.
This project is inspired by the upcoming centenary and will enable the University Archives to better support research and activities in connection with the centenary celebrations.
Follow our progress below and on the History Centre's blog (filter using the category 'University Centenary').
Don't forget to keep an eye on our Stories from the Strongrooms talks. So far we've posted the following videos exploring the University's history:
The University of Hull - Early Years in Pictures
Note: We're completing new collection catalogues all the time but these are not yet available online. We're holding off on releasing them until we're further into the project in case we uncover any more treasures. If you are interested in accessing anything please do get in touch using the email archives@hull.ac.uk .
Update: June 2024
June has seen the continuation of our volunteering programme. Ben has finished box listing a set of inaugural lecture booklets, Alfie made great inroads to digitising the earliest issues of Torch, the first student magazine, whilst Louis has digitised around half of a collection of graduation ceremony DVD recordings. We want to say a huge thank you to them for all their hard work and wish them well in their future careers. Meanwhile, Alice continues to index a set of university scrapbooks, Lydia is working her way through the vast City Archives to compile a list of all records relating to the University of Hull, Moses has researched and is now writing a selection of blogs based on the student newspaper Hullfire, and Jonathan has joined us to pick up where Alfie left off. George’s work to enhance the descriptions of the University’s annual calendars is going well, and he’ll be back after the summer break to continue this work.
As far as the cataloguing goes, we’ve been concentrating on the records of the University’s student administration services. So far we’ve catalogued a series of student lists going back to 1927, and we’re now working on an accompanying set of office files that capture the institution of foreign exchange programmes in the 1980s, as well as strategy work relating to student statistics… 6 boxes down, 18 to go, we’ll see you in July!
Update: May 2024
Our first cohort of student volunteers have started with us, so welcome to Louis, Ben, George, Moses, Alice and Alfie! We're very happy to have you with us so thank you for getting involved!
Update: April 2024
Good news, we've finished cataloguing the University's Anglican Chaplaincy records, and we've even started working on a small collection of accommodation office files! And in further good news, our student volunteer programme is now live! Find our more here.
Update: March 2024
Nothing flashy to announce I'm afraid as we've had a month of quietly getting on with things. We've been working on the records of the University's Anglican Chaplaincy and hope to have the catalogue finished next month. We've also been planning several volunteer projects to help us get through some of the work.
Update: February 2024
Our sorting has continued, and we've been weeding a legacy Local Studies collection that was deacesssioned by Hull Local Studies Library and transferred to the University Archives. So far we've found a lot of duplicates for things we already have, but there have been a few items that we don't have!
Update: January 2024
This month we've been sorting through pamphlets and publicity material produced by Middleton Hall to advertise events held at the venue. There's lots of work to do here and we've been looking at how we might get some student volunteers to help us. Watch out for future updates, we'll be advertising opportunities on our Volunteer Projects page.
Update: December 2023
After an initial cataloguing flurry back in September and October, we’ve now reached some of the larger series of records. December has been a month of planning to get us ready to tackle material produced by Middleton Hall and our University Library in the new year.
Update: November 2023
November was a busy month for the project. Our first project intern completed their work to digitize a series of graduation programmes dating back to the early 1950s, enhancing descriptions along the way. Read all about the work in Montaha's blog post. With this work done, we spent the next few weeks updating catalogue records and listing an accompanying series of congregation recordings on VHS and DVD.
We also had a stocktaking week during which the History Centre was closed for us to do some behind the scenes work. We spent our time taking stock of University material in our audio-visual store. We discovered some fantastic photographs along with a reel of film recording the foundation stone laying ceremony, held in the late 1920s!
Update: October 2023
The project began back in July, when we started with a survey of what we have. Next, we got physical and moved the collections around in our strongrooms, giving us space to work and making sure successive accessions to individual collections were located together. Find out more about this work in our blog post 'All Change: The University's records move house'.
After this we could get cracking and the cataloguing work began! By the end of September we had catalogued the following collections:
- Records of the Students Union
- Records of Hull University Social Services Organisation
- Papers of T.W. Bamford on the History of the University
- Records of the Centre for Languages in Education
- Records of the Hull University Staff Cricket Club
- Records of the Lecturing and Administrative Staff Association
- Records of the University Staff Women's Club
- Records of the Senior Common Room
- Annual Reports and Accounts
- Annual Calendars
- The University Gazette
- Records of the Centre for South East Asian Studies
- Press Cuttings Books
Read more about the background to the project on our blog 'Introducing the University Records Project'.