In search of Morley Museum – Part 3

The third part of Joey Talbot’s trilogy of articles exploring the collections of the Morley Museum. Part 1 and Part 2 were published over the last two weeks and we strongly recommend reading them before diving into this final section…. So now we come to the third part of the story of the Morley Museum….

In search of Morley Museum – Part 2

Part two of Joey Talbot’s trilogy of articles on the mysteries and wonders of Morley Museum. Part one was published last week – we recommend reading before starting part two… In a spacious room on the first floor of the Morley Library building there was once a museum. In the previous article, I introduced this…

In search of Morley Museum – Part 1

In this set of articles by Joey Talbot, Secret Library Leeds becomes Secret Library Morley, as we go in search of the many treasures that could once be found within the walls of the Morley Museum. This is part one of a three part series – keep an eye out for parts two and three…

Reading the city: Leeds City Council papers

This week on the Secret Library we are delighted to hear once again from Andy Armstrong, one of our heritage volunteers, on a significant piece of cataloguing work we’ve asked them to help us with. You can find more articles about the history of Leeds Libraries elsewhere on the blog… Hi. My name’s Andy Armstrong and I have…

Banned Books in 1975

It’s Banned Books Week this week (September 22 to September 28). We’ve recently unearthed this wonderful list of books banned by Leeds (Public) Libraries in 1975 – or, if not quite banned entirely, at least only available with Librarian approval. While we definitely don’t operate in this way anymore, we thought it would be interesting…

Leeds Libraries a Century Ago – All Human Life Was There

As a celebration of Volunteers Week 2024, running from next Monday (June 3) to the following Sunday (June 9), we asked freelance writer and one of our longstanding Heritage Volunteers, Tony Harcup, to tell us about about the research he has been doing with old newspaper stories about libraries. When Leeds Libraries appealed for help…

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…