Draft Vision

The Library's Archives and Special Collections is a repository of unique physical and digital resources. Our mission is to empower learning, research, and civic engagement by collecting, preserving, and making these resources readily accessible. This document outlines a vision to unlock the full potential of our collections and propel them into the future.

Building strong relationships and fostering inclusivity will be the key to our success. We will work with colleagues across the schools and professional services to develop and deliver our service offer to the benefit of the institution. We will look to develop and strengthen relationships with other organisations and the wider community through the co-creation of content and facilitating access to the material we hold.

Salford Digital Archives

Launched in 2021, Salford Digital Archives offers a variety of unique resources online, from photographs and documents to literary manuscripts, sound recordings and historical plans. This online archive makes it easier for students, researchers, and the public to explore collections held by the University and our partners. We are continually growing and expanding Salford Digital Archives by commissioning new collections annually. To find out more visit Salford Digital Archives.

Partnerships

We love working in partnership and see this as the best way to unlock the full potential of archives and special collections as teaching, learning and research resources. We have worked with our neighbours, Salford Local History Library and the Working-Class Movement Library, to curate new digital collections for Salford Digital Archives, to surface and broaden access to some of the unique material they hold. We have also been hosts to Salford Zine Library and have used this as a springboard to create our own Zine Maker Space and to embed the use of zines as a form of assessment for teaching and learning.

We also work in close partnership with academic schools and departments across the University. We have worked closely with the Alumni and Development Team to create the Maxwell Hall Digital Archive and the School of Business to enable access to the Vikas Shah Archive. A partnership with the School of Engineering and Environment resulted in a successful funding bid to the Paul Mellon Institute for British Art for the project The Modern Backdrop, using archive collections in research and knowledge transfer through a conference, workshops and exhibitions at the Working-Class Movement Library and the Salford Museum and Art Gallery.

Student-focused projects

Our archives and special collections contain primary source material covering a variety of topics and subject areas and are teaching and learning resource unique to Salford. This means we can use the collections to develop a range of student focused projects, including:

• the Walter Greenwood Prize for MA Regional and World Literature
• an ‘Alternative Prospectus’ assignment using our Zine Collection and Student Union Archive for BA Photography
• using stories from the University Archives to develop digitally interactive media on the module ‘Making Public History’.

We have also used our collections to give students practical experience in digitisation techniques and metadata skills.

Opening up the archive

Enabling users access to unique primary source material is important to us, and that is why we are investing in a new content management system specifically for archives and special collections. This will bring together all information about what we hold and provide access to into one space, to aid discoverability for staff, students and the public and to enable us to manage our collections better. Alongside this we will work on getting more of our uncatalogued material listed, to help unlock the full potential of the material we hold.

We want to build a collection that is of use and inspiration to our colleagues and students. To do this we will prioritise collaboration with academic colleagues to identify areas of greatest impact for teaching, learning, and research. By focusing on these key areas, we will make the most of our valuable resources including space, time, and budgets. This will allow us to expand what we can offer in terms of archive material whilst maintaining the highest professional standards for the items already in our care.

We will use our expertise and professional judgement to assess the relevance of potential acquisitions for future needs, to help ensure that a collection remains relevant. We believe that by collaborating and engaging with all parts of the University we can ensure our resources best serve the institution.

The University Archives acts as the corporate memory, capturing the institution's story for staff, students, and the broader community. We actively seek to preserve records that illuminate our history and the contributions of our people.

We think it essential that we build our digital preservation capabilities in collaboration with departments across the University. This will ensure that we as an institution are capturing the born-digital records that will become the archives of tomorrow and enable future generations to continue the story of the university and the staff and students and make it. We recognise that some formats, such as the University website, as a dynamic and ever evolving reflection of our activities, requires specialised expertise for long-term preservation and is already entrusted to a dedicated external repository.

We need to ensure that our collections remain relevant and of use to our students and researchers and we look to build our collections through a range of methods, including receiving them as gifts, and bequests, and in the case of university records as direct transfers from other departments. Through the Leon Locker endowment, we can look to make targeted purchases that meet our vision. Irrespective of the method we use, we look to optimise our investment of resources whilst ensuring compliance with legal and ethical frameworks, including Freedom of Information, copyright, and GDPR. This is to ensure that our collections meet professional standards and can be made accessible and preserved for the long term.

If the material we are offered material doesn’t fit our collecting criteria, we will provide guidance on finding a more suitable home for it. Ultimately, our goal is to preserve and curate a permanent archive and special collections that serve as an invaluable resource for generations to come.

All new acquisitions will be documented following established best practice. A deposit form, signed by both the donor and the archives will address aspects like ownership, storage, access, copyright and opportunities for digitisation to build trust with donors and ensure that we can manage and use the material in the future.