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University of Bradford >> Library >> Special Collections >> Meet the Collections
Special Collections at the University of Bradford includes over 100 named collections of archives and rare books. They include letters, photographs, artworks, maps, meeting minutes, notebooks and drafts of books, and even J.B. Priestley’s pipes. The "physical" collections, if laid out in a line in their boxes or shelves, would easily stretch from the University to the centre of Bradford. We also have growing digital collections.
We specialise in material relating to the University's areas of expertise, its history, and its Yorkshire location, dating from the 19th century onwards. Our archives tell stories of non-violent direct action, nuclear disarmament campaigns, ancient industries and culture, archaeology in the 20th century, 19th century Bradford, and the development of local writers, religions and ideas. Our printed book collections are particularly useful for local history, including many Bradford imprints, history of science and technology, and 19th and 20th century politics, religion and esoterica.
We hope that the following resources will help you decide whether the Special Collections are relevant to you. If you need further help, please contact Special Collections staff.
Each collection has its own web page. The pages can be found via these lists.
Catalogues, collection descriptions and handlists of our archive collections can be found on:
Collection descriptions can also be found on the Library catalogue. Not all our finding aids are online yet, so please contact Special Collections staff if you can't find the level of detail you need.
The printed book collections contain books which are too old, rare, fragile, valuable etc to be made available on the open shelves, in particular, any handpress era books (pre-1850). Other collections are developed to support particular archives. In Special Collections, we treat journals and pamphlets as printed books.
All Special Collections books are catalogued on the Library catalogue. Our books are important not only for their text, but as artefacts, so wherever possible, we include details of condition and provenance. You can limit a search to Special Collections by using the drop-down box.
Most Special Collections books now appear on COPAC, thanks to the COPAC Challenge Fund. We have omitted for the present a couple of collections in need of major stock editing. COPAC is a union catalogue of books in university, national and special libraries in the UK. If it’s not on COPAC, it is pretty rare!
Like most Special Collections departments, we have many collections awaiting cataloguing. We will do our best to help readers to access such material, but it is not always possible, particularly where collections are large or contain personal data.
This page contains links to Adobe PDF and/or Microsoft Office files. Online conversion tools (please use the e-mail submission if the Web-based form is unsuccessful) and free PDF Reader software are available from Adobe. A list of viewers/readers for Microsoft and Flash software is available. Alternatively, please e-mail the content manager if you need documents in another format.