This week, to celebrate International Women’s Day, Library and Digital Assistant Alexandra Brummitt, looks at the works and life of the first British feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft. Looking at Wollstonecraft’s most famous work, she discusses how this work influenced the suffrage movement and generations of feminists. When thinking of the suffrage movement at the turn of…
Author: Leeds Libraries
LGBT+ History Month: Under the Scope at Leeds Libraries
This week we welcome Library and Digital Assistant Heather Edwards, who has written a fascinating article on a pioneer of medical history for LGBT+ History Month, told using books in the collections at our Central Library. Update: Since the publication of this article, Heather has written two sequels. Read them here: Part 2 and Part…
Reflections of a Secret Library Guest Author
This week, as part of our 10th birthday celebrations, we hear from Tony Scaife, regular guest contributor to the blog, who offers his thoughts about the last decade of research and writing for the Secret Library… As just one of many guest contributors it is gratifying to be asked to write a post for the…
Ten years of guest authors!
Over the past ten years the Secret Library Leeds blog has seen a host of guest authors writing about their projects, studies or interests. Here we look back at just a few of them. Guest authors come about in a variety of ways. Sometimes a researcher will approach Leeds Libraries with a query and in…
Celebrating a decade of the Secret Library Leeds: 2014 – 2024
This week Librarian Antony Ramm looks back on a special anniversary for the Secret Library blog… “I go into my library and all history unrolls before me.” Alexander Smith The Secret Library Leeds officially launched on Friday February 7 2014 – exactly ten years ago today (to the minute: 3.29pm). Ten years! A full decade,…
A Book to Dye For
In this blog post Rhian Isaac, Senior Librarian for Special Collections and Heritage, shares a deadly discovery. One weekend I stumbled upon an intriguing article in National Geographic that highlighted the Winterthur Museum’s Poison Book Project, and it instantly caught my attention. I was captivated with the idea of poisonous books lying undetected in library collections,…
Healing the City: Health and Wellbeing in the Leeds City Council Archives
This week on the Secret Library we hear from one of our heritage volunteers on a significant piece of cataloguing work we’ve asked them to help us with… Hi. My name’s Andy Armstrong and I have taken on the task of sifting through 200 years of Leeds City Council papers held by the library to…
An American Exchange in Aireborough
This week on the blog Helen Skilbeck recounts a fascinating story about a 1940’s library exchange. Back in 1948 two female librarians – one from Aireborough and one from North Carolina – applied to exchange roles for a year. Margaret Scoffield had been appointed the first full-time professional librarian for Aireborough Libraries in 1942. Virginia…
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