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.
Young Women's Christian Association magazines online!
The Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) grew out of 'missions' to help working women founded in the 1850s. As the name of the organisation suggests, there was a strong religious grounding to much of the YWCA's welfare work, but the organisation was also involved in campaigns relating to education, physical wellbeing and other social issues.
The Modern Records Centre has a large but incomplete series of magazines and journals published by the YWCA between 1884-1970. Editions of the journals for 1884, 1887, 1892-1898, 1900, 1906-1920, have been digitised and are available to read through our online catalogue.
The journals include a mix of religious study and advice, serialised stories (often melodramatic), news of YWCA work at home and abroad (including missionary work), and articles on a range of social and political issues relating to women, including employment, education, fashion, suffrage and the First World War.
Pride in the Archives
To mark LGBT+ History Month, the Modern Records Centre's new exhibition highlights some of the sources on LGBTQ+ experiences, identities and activism included in our archive collections.
Items on display range from 1970s Gay Liberation Front publications, a 1905 book on Oscar Wilde passed between owners as a symbol of (then illegal) identity, photos of demonstrations and a contemporary 1950s article on Roberta Cowell.
The exhibition will be open to all throughout February during our usual opening hours.
Closure over Christmas and New Year
The Modern Records Centre will be closed to researchers from Friday 24 December 2021 until Tuesday 4 January 2022, and we will be unable to respond to enquiries over that period.
Given the current Covid situation, please check the website for updates over the closure period, in case we are not able to re-open to researchers as planned on 4 January. In line with our current guidance, the MRC is open only by prior appointment, due to restricted capacity in the searchroom.
We wish all our researchers a very Merry Christmas and look forward to welcoming you back in 2022!