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 collectionSeveral of our heritage volunteers, a student placement and a Duke of Edinburgh volunteer have all been busy working on our print…
Category: Collections
Within Our Grasp: The archive as stimulus for a creative response
This week on the Secret Library Leeds blog we hear from a group of students who have been working on a project connected to Leodis, our online photographic archive. As third-year BA (Hons) Photography students at Leeds Arts University, we were invited to explore the Leodis photographic archive at Leeds Central Library and given a…
Football, fanzines and the media today
This week from heritage volunteer Pete Slater, who brings us part I of three articles exploring his research into the rich history of football fanzine culture. You can hear Pete talk about that research at a research showcase coming up on June 26 – part of the programme for the Voice of the Fans exhibition,…
Unearthing Spark: A Student Archivist’s Experience at Leeds Central Library
This week we hear from guest author Lauren Stead, who has been investigating in more detail one of our Central Library’s major collections… As a history student, I believe the most exciting element of research is working with primary sources. By looking at material created by and for people in the past, a deeper understanding…
Why The Golden Beam?
This week we welcome back Library and Digital Assistant Jan Pinder, who finds the answer to a question in the artistry of a local legend… Why was the newest Wetherspoons in Leeds named The Golden Beam? Opened on June 8 2021 it seems a curious name choice for a pub, particularly considering that many of…
The mountain, the logbook, and the wickedest man in the world: early days of the climbing scene
This week we welcome back Library and Digital Assistant Joey Talbot, who explores the fascinating history of climbing in the Leeds Libraries collections… During April, we’re holding a display of climbing and mountaineering related materials in the Local and Family History Library, and to tie into that I’m bringing you a little taste of the…
The Chimney Corner: Secret Books from the Secret Library #10
The latest in an occasionally-regular series exploring books and other items selected from our vast collections. In this entry Librarian Antony Ramm looks at a collection of materials illuminating a late 18th century election in Yorkshire… Our previous entry in this series looked at a slim 18th century volume of Yorkshire topography. In this current article we remain in the…
The Chimney Corner: Secret Books from the Secret Library #9
The latest in an occasionally-regular series exploring books and other items selected from our vast collections. In this entry Librarian Antony Ramm looks at a slim 18th-century volume of antiquarian musings… Titled ‘A Survey of Yorkshire,’ it is debatable, really, whether this is even a book at all: although bound like a book, it is quite clearly a chapter, one…
The Secret Library | Leeds Libraries Heritage Blog 