Research opportunities

91直播 Digital Collections allows University of Manchester academics to curate digital editions of important items from the collections, contextualising them and bringing their research on the collections to a wider audience.

91直播 Digital Collections is launching today with the following collections:

A cross-institutional collaboration

The image viewer has been led by Dr Guyda Armstrong, Faculty Lead for Digital Humanities, in close collaboration with:

• Cambridge University Library,
• The University of Manchester Library,
• The John Rylands Research Institute,
• IT Services,
• The School of Arts, Languages and Cultures,
• 91直播 Museum, and
• The Whitworth.

The Reading Room will be closed entirely on Monday 1 and Tuesday 2 July. However, from 3 July until the completion of the work, the service will be offered from the Christie Room on the first floor of the historic part of The John Rylands Library to ensure minimum disruption.

The refurbishment will offer improvements to the reader experience together with enhanced security and care of the collections through a redesigned staff workspace.

About the Reading Room

The room, located on the fourth floor of our Deansgate site, is an air conditioned, quiet space where anyone can register to access items from our world class Special Collections.

Christie Room interim arrangement

Services and routes throughout the building may alter at various times during the refurbishment so please do check the Special Collections Reading Room webpages for any updates ahead of your visit.

You can see some artist's impressions of the new Reading Room above, and .

Further details

For more information, contact Dominic Marsh, Project Co-ordinator.

Called the “book of ours” it hopes to reassert the identity and individuality of people who are sometimes dismissed as “homeless” when they are so much more. This project is funded by the .

We were extremely proud to host our first research visit with the group, who came to look at some of our medieval manuscripts for inspiration.

John Hodgson, the Library’s Head of Special Collections, led the group on a tour of The John Rylands Library, followed by a close look at a 500year-old medieval Book of Hours.

A touching and heartfelt summary of their trip can be found on the .

鈥�We wish everyone involved in the project the very best of luck, and we can’t wait to see the finished work.

Image copyright Lois Blackburn.

To establish a service that delivers an excellent experience tailored to users’ needs, the Library led extensive research and pilot schemes to understand students’ attitudes to their reading. Students responded that they are more likely to complete their assigned reading when provided as an eTextbook, and prefer the format thanks to increased availability, convenience and low cost.

Students can download their core text to multiple devices via the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) for free, meaning they can access crucial course material anywhere at no cost. The Library’s eTextbooks have been accessed from 96 countries since September 2018.

To encourage students to engage deeply with their reading, eTextbooks provided by the Library include integrated learning tools such as note sharing, highlighting and annotations. Tutors can monitor usage and engagement via an analytics dashboard.

Find out more about the eTextbook Programme on .

Dr Nicola Grayson from the Library's Learning Development Team reveals how the Library played a key role.

Background

Due to the impressive reputation of the  team and our excellent resources, the Library was approached by the University’s Widening Participation and Recruitment team to contribute to a  funded project. The project is designed to promote progression to postgraduate study for minority groups and those from disadvantaged areas.

The project is led by the University of Leeds but includes: The University of Manchester, Newcastle University, The University of Sheffield, the University of Warwick, and the University of York and this blog post will detail how the University of Manchester Library was involved.

The project

The project has two strands:

• The delivery of face-to-face skills support to third year undergraduate students in Biology, Economics and English to encourage progression to postgraduate study.
• The development of an online course targeted at offer holding postgraduate students who fall within the groups identified above.

A previous HEFCE project in 2014/15 called ‘Widening Access to Postgraduate 91直播 and Fair Access to the Professions’ had found that master’s degrees could lead to higher earnings, provide access to certain professions and encourage and enable progression to postgraduate research.

The groups targeted by the current project have lower levels of take-up to postgraduate study and the limited research that’s available points to some influencing factors e.g. difficulty in the mastery of key skills or academic practices and the prevalence of processes that don’t take into account individual knowledge and skills.

The Library worked on both strands of the HEFCE project and members of staff from our Learning Development, Teaching and Learning, E-learning, Customer Service and Student teams were all involved in putting together the online and face-to-face support.

Face to face and online

We developed skills workshops that were tailored to studying biology, economics and English called ‘Think like a Postgrad’. These workshops focused on supporting students with the enhancement and development of reading, note-taking, academic writing and time-management skills.

The online course, called ‘Prepare for Postgrad’, is comprised of a series of modules. Each institution worked on a separate module within set parameters so that when packaged together the modules formed one extended programme of support for offer holding postgraduate students.

The online course features introductory modules that were designed to welcome students and enable them to feel supported and prepared. It also includes personal effectiveness modules, that focus on managing time, building resilience and cultivating wellbeing, as well as academic confidence modules which detail how to take control of your learning, how to read effectively and how to write with confidence. The University of Manchester Library developed the writing with confidence module.

Modules

We had to align our module with the effective reading module and produce content suitable for postgraduate level study. We also had to ensure that we used a variety of different media (podcasts, quizzes and ) to engage the students and that no institution specific branding or references were included as the course needed to be appropriate for each of the participating institutions to host and run.

We organised our module to focus on assisting students with:

• Breaking down the question and organising ideas
• Developing effective writing habits
• Developing writing confidence

It was a lot of work to put the face-to-face and online support together and we had to do so with a very quick turnaround time; all those who contributed to this project did so in addition to their normal daily duties.

However, it is important that we at the Library continue to demonstrate our value as a centre for pedagogical expertise and the area of widening access to postgraduate study for any and all students is a worthy area in which to make a positive contribution to further research and promote inclusion.

Dr Nicola Grayson - Learning Development Team

Collecting institutions like the University of Manchester Library are increasingly facing the challenge of preserving 'born digital' material when acquiring recent and contemporary archives.

One of the most important modern archives held by the Library is that of Carcanet Press, one of the UK’s premier poetry publishing houses. Correspondence with poets, critics, editors, translators and artists is a key element of this archive and provides a rich resource for researchers. Most of this correspondence is now conducted by email.

This JISC-funded project aims to tackle the challenge of capturing and preserving the email archive of Carcanet Press.

Basing its work on traditional archival practice and digital preservation standards, the project is using this email archive as a test-bed for practical digital preservation.

The project will test and assess existing tools for metadata extraction, validation, migration, packaging and ingest. Different long-term preservation formats for email will also be explored.

The project team is developing documentation and workflows which can be adapted so that the JRUL is well-placed to deal with similar born-digital archives in the future.

Read the final .

The gift has been welcomed by Rebecca Tipton, Lecturer in Interpreting and Translation Studies at the , who noted:

Look out for a small exhibition of book covers in the cabinet up on Green 3 in the Main Library, and listen out for a live performance of Burgess' music in the Library later in the year. You can find all our translated Anthony Burgess works in .

A full list of the languages included in the collection:

• Croatian
• Czech
• Danish
• Dutch
• Estonian
• Finnish
• French
• Georgian
• German
• Greek
• Hungarian
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Latvian
• Norwegian
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Romanian
• Russian
• Slovenian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Turkish

The newspaper collection, currently housed in The University of Manchester Library, was captured using high quality scanners equipped with ultra-sonic, double feed detection, automated colour detection and image processing applications. The images were then formatted to a high quality and are accessible across all digital devices.

, which was funded by The University of Manchester Library, forms the first steps in building a comprehensive digital archive chronicling these periods of modern Iranian history, events that have shaped Iran鈥檚 turbulent relations with the West and continue to resonate to this day.

Dr Siavush Randjbar-Daemi, a lecturer in Iranian history, said: