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Meet the teams

Special Collections

Contact Special Collections

Contact Special Collections by email or phone:

Our service

Our Special Collections house over 200,000 rare books and hundreds of thousands of manuscripts and archives. We carefully archive thousands of items each year to help support research at the university.

Items from Special Collections are often exhibited at the Treasures of the Brotherton Gallery, The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery and further afield. Our online exhibitions showcase highlights from digitised collections.

We are also home to the Institutional Archive of the University, and have Designated Status for five outstanding national and international collections:

Our conservationists preserve rare books and manuscripts in our conservation studio. Our digitisation studio is used to photograph unique items from collections, making them more accessible whilst preserving the originals.

How we can help

You can visit Special Collections in the Brotherton Library to view items in person. Items must be requested in advance of any visit. Guidance can be found on our Plan a visit page

You can search our collections online. You can view the images of the many items that are digitised.

We support academic staff who would like to use the collections as part of their course.