Family History Fact Checking – Part 1

This week we welcome back Becky from the Local and Family History Library who tells us about a recent enquiry and how she went about solving it. The enquiry came from a customer keen to track down a photo of a home that their family used to inhabit: I am trying to find a photograph…

More Tales from the Horsforth Research Guide

This week we hear from Library and Digital Assistant Jan Pinder with another fascinating ramble around Horsforth, following on from last year’s Tales from the Horsforth Research Guide… The Horsforth research guide was produced as a starting point for anyone wishing to use the Central Library stock to find out more about the history of…

Happy Volunteers’ Week!

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…

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…

VE Day 80th Anniversary

To commemorate the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day, Leeds Libraries have created a gallery of photographs on Leodis, our online photographic archive, showing how the people of Leeds celebrated both VE and VJ Day. But we feel sure there are more images out there so are inviting anyone who may have their own…

Municipal Bedrooms

This week Antony Ramm takes a brief tour around the bedrooms of Leeds… I was recently playing around with the Pot Luck feature on our Leodis image archive (www.leodis.net) to find inspiration for a blog article. (Do try the Pot Luck tool if you’ve not used it before!) One image that instantly stood out of…

‘Town Street’: Re-imagining Armley in photographs

This week in Local and Community History Month we hear from Hannah White, who has creatively re-used some images from our Leodis archive to show contrasts and continuities between Town Street in Armley, then and now… You can read much more about Armley in our mini-series of articles, or explore our Armley research guide to…