News
Our news feed contains information about new resources, newly catalogued or acquired archive collections, current and upcoming projects and events, and service developments.
Information about past work at the Modern Records Centre is included in our annual reports and information bulletins (available online from 1996/7 to 2016/7). Recordings of several past events are also available - the student-led Open Education Series, 2014-2016, and the schools project Archives Alive, 2016.
Mining union archives to be conserved!
We're delighted to announce that the Modern Records Centre has been awarded £6,000 from two funders for essential conservation work to help preserve a recently rediscovered archive collection.
Found in the former union headquarters in Barnsley, the archives of the National Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shotfirers (NACODS) are an important and hitherto inaccessible source on 20th century British industrial history. Left in an unheated and otherwise empty building for nine years, the archives are currently damp and at risk from insect damage. The £6,000 funding will pay for specialist archive conservation work to dry and deinfest the collection, so that the 80 boxes of selected material can be safely stored at the MRC, without endangering other archives.
The collection includes printed executive minutes and conference proceedings from the union's formation in 1910 onwards, manuscript minutes from the 1950s onwards, and administrative and subject files, mostly from the 1980s-2000s, which include sources on the 1984/5 miners' strike and the union's response to the post-strike programme of colliery closures.
We would like to very much thank our two funders for their financial support which will allow us to stabilise the NACODS archives so that the collection can be safely transferred to our stores for cataloguing:
The National Archives, through their Records at Risk scheme (grant of £5,000)
The Society for the Study of Labour History (grant of £1,000)
