MANCHESTER COLLECTIONS
Imagine2030
Annual report 2024-25
Digital Archive Collections
The Digital Archive budget for financial year 2024-25 enabled us to expand our offering of multidisciplinary online archival and primary source collections in support of our role as a National Research Library.
Most notably, we have added a curated selection of Digital Collections from British Online Archives to our discovery interface, including several that draw together digital surrogates of material held in Northern institutions. Many of these collections contain digitised materials that complement existing strengths in our Special Collections, such as those related to the suffrage movement; historical and regional trade; slavery and emancipation; and investigative journalism.
We have also acquired access to the Global Development and Humanitarian Aid digital archive (from Gale Cengage), a unique collection that covers disaster response and community preparedness in Europe, Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Americas, sourced from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) network. This collection complements existing researcher access to the wide-ranging Global Issues Library (from ProQuest) and to our pioneering Humanitarian Archive housed at The John Rylands Library.
The Metadata and Discovery Team source, enrich and create metadata for these externally hosted Digital Archival Collections to support research and discovery of digitised primary source content in the Library’s discovery interface. This work often involves a significant amount of data-mapping and enhancement to ensure optimal bibliographic description and subject analysis.
The Library’s Collection Engagement Group promoted and showcased several notable digital archives, acquired in close collaboration with our academic colleagues.
Promotions included the Royal Society Journals Archive (1665 - 1996), offering over 350 years of groundbreaking scientific publishing, Cambridge Histories Online, a cornerstone reference series for interdisciplinary study, and Refugees, Relief and Resettlement, a vital resource for exploring forced migration and the history of refugees.
In addition, the Harpers Bazaar Archive (1867 – present) joined our growing suite of magazine holdings providing insights into popular culture and society.
Expanding access to Chinese academic e-books
In response to growing demand for Chinese-language academic resources, the Library acquired access to China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) Academic E-Books, an authoritative platform offering thousands of scholarly titles from China’s leading publishers.
This initiative was shaped through close collaboration with academic colleagues in the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures (SALC) and Library teams across Engagement, Collection Services, Metadata and Discovery Team, and E-Resources. This new digital resource significantly enhances accessibility, enabling users to engage with high quality content from anywhere, at any time, supporting interdisciplinary teaching and research and enriching our students’ learning experience across a wide range of subject areas.
Publisher-supplied metadata was enhanced and remediated by the Metadata & Discovery Team to ensure optimal display of transcribed and transliterated bibliographic data.
“I'd like to express my deep gratitude to you for getting the CNKI E-Book database! It has so far helped me obtain access to around 400 books, including at least 5 whole sets of important materials. The database is so convenient to use thanks to its connection with our online library catalogue as well”
This is one of seven evidence-based acquisition (EBA) schemes currently running, making an additional 250,000 titles accessible to our users. At the end of 12 months, key titles are then selected for ownership.
Manchester Digital Collections: The Dante Digital Library (ENVDANTE)
The Dante Digital Library launched in May 2025, showcasing one of the world’s finest collections of Dante Alighieri's works which are held at The John Rylands Library.
This collection, online and freely available to view, includes rare and important early works, such as incunable editions of Divina Commedia. Producing the digital collection was part of an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project, Envisioning Dante, c.1472–c.1630: Seeing and Reading the Early Printed Page, led by John Rylands Research Institute Director and Principal Investigator for the research project, Professor Guyda Armstong, in collaboration with the Library.
The project developed the collection for the Library's state of the art digital image platform Manchester Digital Collections and took several years to complete, involving Library teams from the Collections Strategies, AI & Ideas Adoption and Special Collections Directorates. These teams collaborated to produce sector leading imaging and enriched Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) metadata, driving us throughout the process to advance the techniques we use to host, describe, and share our collections with readers and researchers worldwide. The Dante Digital Library launch formed the backdrop of the international conference Envisioning Dante: Seeing and Reading the Early Printed Page, also in May 2025.
Manchester Digital Collections platform developments
The Digital Development Team have contributed to some significant developments in the Manchester Digital Collections (MDC) platform over the past year.
A sophisticated Content Warning system has been developed providing users with alerts regarding potentially harmful text or imagery within the collection they are about to view. There is also the option to disable this system if preferred. It can be added to any collection on MDC, as well as customised to best suit the material in question, some of which may require the blurring of images or warnings about a specific subject.
The system has been initially applied to the Rag Rag collection due to the sensitive nature of its content, but can easily be applied to other collections as needed.
Manchester Collections: Transatlantic partnerships in manuscript research
The John Rylands Library, in collaboration with the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, is preparing its most ambitious overseas exhibition to date: Lives and Literacy in Ancient Egypt, opening in April 2026. This joint project will introduce North American audiences to Rylands papyri and manuscripts that reveal how writing shaped both the rhythms of daily life and the reach of empire in Greco-Roman and late antique Egypt. At its heart is papyrus itself, seemingly fragile and fibrous, yet remarkably enduring, and the medium on which whole worlds of meaning were recorded.
This past year has been one of meticulous transformation. Conservation Teams have been rehousing manuscripts from ageing mounts into new frames that protect while allowing their scripts to be seen anew. Imaging staff have turned technical skill into almost an art form: photographing a 28-foot Book of the Dead roll using multispectral techniques to bring back faint traces of ink. Curatorial, Registrar, and Legal Teams have worked together on the details of the international loan, ensuring these fragile objects will travel safely and speak powerfully abroad.
In parallel, the Coptic Limbo project in partnership with UT Austin is reviving hundreds of fragments first described by Walter Crum in 1909 as belonging to “a limbo.” That phrase has stuck, capturing that state of these manuscripts in scholarship for more than a century. Yet even as he consigned them to limbo, Crum noted that they might one day yield more, once knowledge advanced and techniques improved. That day has come. Together with Coptic scholars from the University of Texas at Austin, these fragments have been digitised and catalogued and are already surprising us: two Coptic works forgotten to history have emerged, now in preparation for publication.
Both projects remind us that the difficulty of reading ancient texts is also their gift: they demand collaboration, spark imagination, and invite us to cross boundaries of language, discipline, and geography. In Manchester and Austin, fragile survivals are becoming vessels of creative research and shared discovery.
New special collections
The Papers of the legendary journalist, editor, and author Sir Harold Evans (1928–2020) arrived in Manchester in March 2025. Born in Eccles, Evans started his career at the Ashton-under-Lyne Reporter, subsequently making his name as the fearless editor of the Sunday Times who exposed the British Intelligence Officer Kim Philby as a Soviet spy, championed the posthumous pardon of Timothy Evans, who was wrongly convicted and executed for murder, and spearheaded the groundbreaking thalidomide campaign, overcoming substantial legal barriers to achieve compensation and accountability.
On 12 June 2025 an academic symposium was held at the Rylands exploring newspaper history and investigative journalism. The event concluded with a public lecture by Peter Gillman and Emanuele Midolo on their recently published book Murder in Cairo: Solving a Cold War Spy Mystery.
The acquisition of Henry Dresser's personal copy of A History of the Birds of Europe
This year the Library and Manchester Museum worked together to acquire Henry Eeles Dresser’s own pre-publication copy of his magisterial work of ornithology, A History of the Birds of Europe. Designated by the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest as a national treasure, it was purchased by the Museum in partnership with The John Rylands Library and with the generous support of Art Fund, the Arts Council England/V&A Purchase Grant Fund and the Friends of the Nations’ Libraries.
Originally published in nine volumes between 1871-1896, this work is one of the best regarded ‘bird books’ of the 19th century. In it, Dresser, a leading ornithologist, documents and illustrates bird species from across Europe and beyond, employing the talents of many of the leading natural history artists of the day.
In addition to being his personal copy of the work, annotated in Dresser’s own hand, it is bound in a unique, pre-publication format of 17 volumes. The illustrations, some of which are included in multiple states or versions, are accompanied by Dresser’s notes and instructions to the printers. These annotations will be particularly valuable to researchers into the development of scientific illustration in the hand-colouring period.
The volumes are on display in the Museum’s Living Worlds gallery until Sunday, 25 January 2026. Following this, the books will be transferred to The John Rylands Library, catalogued and made accessible to researchers, students and the wider public.
Image credit: Sotheby's
Image credit: Sotheby's
Dr Williams's Library
As the next step in our exciting partnership with Dr Williams’s Library, we are preparing to receive formal deposit of the organisation’s 135,000 library items, together with its archive and manuscript collections. Forthcoming steps will include assessing the collections for curation and cataloguing and we expect to make the first round of collection materials available to researchers within the next two years.
While the task might be daunting in scale, we are eagerly looking forward to getting to know the riches of this magnificent library.
Interior of Dr Williams's Library
Opened in 1730 and established by the will of Dr Daniel Williams, the leading London nonconformist minister of his day, the library contains not only outstanding collections on nonconformist history, but also materials intended to provide ministers with a broad general education covering history, science, languages, literature, botany and travel. It includes over 30 incunabula, books owned by John Dee, Coleridge and George Eliot, materials on Byzantine history and Hebrew and Jewish Studies, and archives of Richard Baxter, Henry Crabb Robinson and Joseph Priestley, among many others.
Launching The Secret Public
In May 2025 the Rylands hosted a preview event for The Secret Public exhibition. Guests from queer organisations and community groups attended as well as partners who supported the development of the exhibition.
Professor Christopher Pressler welcomed guests followed by speeches from Jon Savage (Professor of Popular Culture and exhibition co-curator) and Jackie Stacey (Professor of Media and Cultural Studies and founder of the University’s Sexuality Summer School).
The Secret Public exhibition opened to the public the day after the preview event. An events programme included talks with Jon Savage, curator tours and regular collections encounters with Manchester queer collections, and has engaged visitors with the exhibition beyond the gallery. In August an outdoor display of photographs by Jon Shard and Stuart Linden opened in Spinningfields, exploring Manchester’s queer night life and promoting the exhibition.
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