It’s Volunteers’ Week 2025 (June 2 – June 8): a chance to celebrate the amazing achievements of our current team of heritage volunteers. Read on for some highlights from the last 12-months!

Print collection
Several of our heritage volunteers, a student placement and a Duke of Edinburgh volunteer have all been busy working on our print collection. This consists of more than 40 large boxes with a combination of photographs, posters, playbills, etchings and prints housed within. Although we do have a card catalogues detailing the contents, a digital record would be far more useful for staff and customers alike. The volunteers have been itemising the contents of these boxes and recording various details of each print including the size – in case we can ever digitise them. The work they are doing will really help us to open up our collections and make resources much for accessible for all.

Photographs
One of our student placements is currently working on an album of tram photographs. He is diligently indexing these images and writing descriptions of each so they can easily be added to the Leodis website. His work includes researching the location of each image, seeing if there is anything specific about the tram pictured and describing the rest of the photograph. Some of the images he has researched are already on Leodis here.

Mary Gawthorpe
Other Heritage Volunteers have been diving into the Mary Gawthorpe collection, especially focusing on the handwritten letters tucked away in the archive. It’s no small task—some of the handwriting is pretty tricky to read!

Mary Gawthorpe was quite the powerhouse. Born in Leeds in 1881, she wore many hats: teacher, suffragette, trade unionist, socialist, and even an editor. She moved to the U.S. in 1916 and spent the rest of her life around New York. After she passed away, her papers ended up at the Tamiment Library at New York University. Luckily, Leeds managed to get microfilm copies, so people here could still access them.

Over the years, researchers have found these papers incredibly valuable, but those handwritten letters can be a real puzzle. That’s where our volunteers come in—they’ve been carefully transcribing them to make the collection easier for everyone to use and enjoy. Get in touch with us to find out more.

Council Papers
Regular readers of the Secret Library will be aware of Andy Armstrong’s superb work curating our huge collection of archival material published by and about Leeds City Council. Over the last year Andy has created research guides exploring the administrative histories of housing and (fittingly) public libraries in the City.

Alongside each research guide breaking down the main features of each topic, Andy has also written blog articles. You can read all Andy’s posts elsewhere on the Secret Library, and see all his research guides under the LEEDS CITY COUNCIL PAPERS AND RECORDS section of our Research Guide collection.

Voice of the Fans
Alongside our core group of Heritage volunteers, we’ve also been working with six more volunteers, all recruited for the specific purpose of supporting our new Voice of the Fans exhibition. This exhibition, a co-production with the British Library and which can be seen at the Central Library until August 10, is the first exhibition dedicated to celebrating the culture of football fanzines.

Our volunteers played an invaluable role in the research and curation of the exhibition – filling us in on some of the historical background around important issues in football fan culture, delving into the archives to locate pieces of essential information, and even loaning us fanzines and other items for the exhibition itself.

The day before the exhibition launch the team – Martyn, Chris, Rob, Paul, Steve and Pete – got together and curated their own spin-off display in our Local and Family History department, bringing together items from our library collections that didn’t make it into Voice of the Fans and highlights from their own (very) rich memorabilia archives. Their display has been a huge hit with visitors so far and can be seen in the department on the 2nd floor until August 10.

You can read articles written by one of the volunteer team, Pete, elsewhere on the blog – and at Pete’s own website focusing on all things football fanzine.

A huge thank you to all our volunteers for their time, patience, and dedication!