Reintroducing the University Records Project

Cast your mind back to Summer 2023 and you might remember that we started a multi-year project to deal with a backlog of uncatalogued material relating to the history of the University of Hull. It had been our intention to write regular blogs during the project, however, work life took over and, to be absolutely honest, we forgot!

Weeded volumes piling up, much like the work when we started!

When we started back in Summer 2023, we had 38 University of Hull related collections that were inaccessible because they hadn’t been catalogued. Two and a half years later, we’ve now dealt with 26 of those collections, that’s 4670 new records added to our cataloguing system! We’re in the process of finalising this data so that we can add it to the History Centre’s online catalogue where it will be searchable by the public.

What have we discovered so far?

Amongst the uncatalogued material we found several collections relating to student and staff organisations and societies. Alongside the records of the Students Union, there are records created by the Hull University Student Services Organisation (aka HUSSO), and the International Students Association. The records of staff associations cover the Staff Cricket Club, Lecturing and Administrative Staff Association, University Staff Women’s Club, Senior Common Room, University of Hull Anglican Chaplaincy, and the Hull Association of University Teachers.

Academic departments and institutes also feature in the records, with collections covering the Centre for Languages in Education, Centre for South East Asian Studies, Drama Department, and the Institute of Education. We also found collections created by individual academic staff members, including Professor Thomas William Bamford (Lecturer in Education), Professor Edwin Dawes (Lecturer in Biomedical Sciences), Professor Doug Thompson (Principal Researcher on the WWII Oral History Project), and Professor Herbert Colin Creighton (Lecturer in Sociology).

Professional services operations are represented by records created within the Accommodation Office, Student Administration Services, and the Finance Office, whilst governance of the university is recorded in a large collection of proceedings and committee minute books.

Finally, there’s a huge amount of published and printed material covering public lectures, departmental and societies newsletters, prospectuses and handbooks, and official publications such as annual reports published centrally. We also found a fantastic collection of scrapbooks containing press cuttings from the late 1920s and a historical pamphlet collection curated by University Library staff.

What’s next?

We’ll be making these new catalogues live in the lead up to the University's centenary year in 2027/28. The release of each new catalogue will be accompanied by a blog exploring any interesting stories we’ve uncovered – WE PROMISE!

We’ll also be finishing work that we’ve started on a set of congregation records, a series of personnel files created by Human Resources, and a large run of bound exam papers.

Alongside this, we’ve just started working on an extensive collection of Vice Chancellor’s files. With the centenary fast approaching, we think this work will take us right up to Summer 2027, and that these files will probably be the last collection we manage to get sorted before the centenary celebrations begin. There are already some fascinating stories coming out of the files and we’ll be sharing these on the blog as we go along.

All of this planned work means that there are some collections we won’t be able to deal with ahead of the university’s centenary year, including material relating to the Department of Adult Education, the Library, Middleton Hall, and the Office of the Registrar. Additionally, there are extensive photographic materials, some audio-visual material, and a very large set of records documenting the University’s Scarborough Campus in need of attention.

So we’re not going anywhere and we have no doubt that the project will continue long after the 2027/28 centenary year – meaning there’s plenty still to come!

Claire (Archivist, Hull University Archives)