MANCHESTER COLLECTIONS
Imagine2030
Annual report 2023-24
Showcasing our collections
The Library's Collections Engagement Group plays a vital role in shaping the Library’s strategic approach to collections engagement. It provides direction for promoting new and existing items and collections to users, improving access, raising awareness, and enhancing the overall user experience.
This year, the Group showcased several notable additions, including the British Film Institute's streaming service, BFI Player; Libby, a reading app for non-academic related books; and a range of digital archives including Royal Geographical Archive, Object Lessons, Gender: Society and Change, Music Online and Making of the Modern World.
The Library's collections are promoted through several channels, including the Library Subject Guides. Over the past year a major cross-team project redeveloped and redesigned the Subject Guides, one of our primary promotion channels, to better serve the evolving needs of students, researchers, and staff.
The project involved extensive user-testing and quality assurance with students and staff, alongside consultations with academic leads across all Faculties. The result is a fresh set of curated, subject-specific guides, offering comprehensive information on our available resources, services, and support, and providing a platform to promote, explore and discover our collections.
Pet Shop Boys: In Conversation with Jon Savage
In April we hosted a prestigious in-conversation event with the UK's most successful music duo, Pet Shop Boys. Held in the iconic Historic Reading Room at the John Rylands Research Institute and Library, the event launched the groups fifteenth studio album Nonetheless.
Conducted by Jon Savage, The University of Manchester's Professor of Popular Culture, the event was a rare opportunity to hear both Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe discuss their 40-year career in music. One of only two such events held in the UK, this was one of the largest public events ever staged at the Rylands and brought music fans from all over the world to Manchester.
Fans queued from midday for the evening event and the 300-strong audience were treated to unique insights into the pair's song writing process and creative approach to both the new album and their back catalogue as well as a playback of the album which had been released the same day.
Professor Jon Savage
Professor Jon Savage
The band also took questions from the audience which confirmed the deep connection between the duo, their music and their fanbase.
The event included a small preview display of the Rylands' next major exhibition opening in May 2025. The Secret Public: LGBTQ Pop will include rare items from the British Pop Archive, the UK's only major archive dedicated to pop culture, youth culture and counter-culture.
Conclusion of ProQuest Thesis Digitisation
In 2024 we concluded the Digital Archiving and Access Program (DAAP) Thesis Digitisation project, which digitised over 22,000 University of Manchester and former UMIST doctoral theses from as far back as 1900. This was led by the Collection Strategies Directorate in partnership with ProQuest.
The vast collection, now stored in our digital preservation system, Preservica, forms an important body of doctoral research, covering a broad range of subjects, with an emphasis on medicine, materials science, chemistry and engineering.
As a print reference collection, this valuable resource wasn't being utilised to its full potential.
However, through full-text digitisation and improved metadata and indexing, we have bought together the University's entire collection of doctoral theses providing high quality OCR'd (Optical Character Recognition) downloadable PDFs which are discoverable via Library Search. All are available as Open Access.
Manchester Digital Collections and Library Search integration
The Library has made it simpler for researchers, students, and the public to discover its digital collections, including ultra-high-quality images and texts.
By integrating Manchester Digital Collections into Library Search, the Library has made more of its unique cultural and research materials discoverable and accessible, making them easier for everyone to see and use.
Strategic investment in additional print purchasing
In 2023-24 we acquired 11,000 books to add to our modern collections (through orders and donations).
Of these, 65% were in print format, a 7% rise in the print book/ebook split, in comparison to 2022-23. This increase was largely driven by our pilot scheme to purchase resources through our Order a Book (Staff) scheme on a print and digital basis, rather than a digital-only basis.
Currently, we can’t make entire e-books available to other libraries via Inter-Library Loan, so this scheme makes it easier for the larger academic community to access our print holdings.
Making a significant and essential contribution to the national research base is a key commitment associated with our role as the National Research Library in the North.
Creation of the Wellbeing collection
Library and University colleagues curated a resource to support key aspects of staff and student wellbeing.
The Wellbeing Reading List features over 300 titles relating to 50 wellbeing topics including anxiety, bereavement, menopause, relationships, stress, sleep problems, burnout and mindfulness. Titles are available from Main Library in print and digital formats.
The reading list appears on the Staff wellbeing and Student Support Taking Care of your Wellbeing pages.
Adam Matthew Digital collaboration
The Imaging Team, supported by the Collection Care Team, launched an exciting partnership with Adam Matthew Digital (AMD). The commercial collaboration involved identifying and photographing over 12,000 physical items for inclusion in a new package which will be available for purchase in 2025.
AMD praised the Library's efforts in creating over 15,000 images with an almost unprecedented low error rate. This commercial partnership not only provides the Library with a small proportion of the digitised content to be freely available online in the short term but also generates funds to employ a new project photographer for further digitisation work next year.
MDC Golden Mummies
Manchester Museum’s blockbuster Golden Mummies of Egypt exhibition now has a digital legacy available to all, thanks to a collaboration between the Museum and Library digital collection specialists. The Golden Mummies collection on Manchester Digital Collections (MDC) showcases digitised items from the Museum’s Egyptology collection in exceptional detail for the first time.
Close working between the Library Digital Development Team, Digital and Special Collections Metadata Team and Museum curators allowed us to develop a pioneering ‘data pipeline’ tool, which enabled the dynamic mapping of images and metadata from the Museum’s collection management system directly to the framework required for MDC. This opens opportunities for streamlined automated processes for future collections and metadata mapping across different schemas and systems.
Additional acquisitions
The Digital Archive budget for financial year 2023-24 enabled us to expand and safeguard many of our prestigious online collections in both science and humanities. Notably, new content has been added to our Newspaper and Parliamentary Papers collections, and our Elsevier journals backfile collection is now complete.
The Library purchased an extremely valuable collection of Oxford University Press, including bibliographies and research encyclopaedias.
Additionally, the Library purchased updates for our Springer ebooks, CABI ebooks, National Theatre and Classical Scores collections. Exciting new purchases include the Global Issues Library, Amnesty International Archive, the Royal Society Journals Archive, seven new subject themed digital archives and four very special collections. These include the Alick E Glennie Archive and the Three Historiated Initials on a Leaf from the Psalter of Joan of Navarre, a Latin illuminated manuscript on vellum.
The Ahmed Iqbal Ullah (AIU) RACE Centre continued to develop its collections through the community-led practices of its sister organisation, the AIU Education Trust.
Preparing for a post-Transitional Agreement (TA) world
In light of the Critical Review of Transitional Agreements conducted by Jisc, the financial pressures faced by the UK Higher Education sector, and the end of block grant support for these deals, the sector is at a turning point. Without knowing what comes next, the Library is continuing to analyse the deals we currently have to determine what we want and do not want from future iterations.
This work involves using Unsub and EZProxy to explore all negotiation scenarios for our journal big deals to ensure that we can continue to provide the content our users need. As we prepare for the future, we have begun to adapt our processes including the establishment of data requirements and the creation of a new framework for assessing deals (from both a read and publish perspective).
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