By Dr Paddy Bullard, Co-director of the Centre for Collections-Based Research at Reading
The University of Reading’s Collections are an outstanding resource, from the Beckett Collection through to the Museum of English Rural Life. Research using Collections is taking place right across the Institution, and has been for a number of years.
Examples include investigations into the Hugh Sinclair Archive by Food and Nutritional Sciences, Architecture’s use of the DWG Collection and use of the WH Smith Archive by the Henley Business School. However, given the breadth and quality of this resource we could be making much greater use of the Collections for grant-winning research.
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Showing, Doing, Telling: Craft And Making
A Season Of Events Exploring Craft And Making At The MERL
Specialists in craft and the arts examine different ways of responding to rural life, exploring how best to nurture old skills, contemporary creative responses and traditional practice.
In this talk, woodsman, bodger and scythesman Mark Allery joins the MERL for a hands-on exploration of some of the scythes in the MERL collection and shares the story of his search for the earliest surviving scythes.
Admission is free, although booking is recommended.
Showing, Doing, Telling: Craft And Making
A Season Of Events Exploring Craft And Making At The MERL
Specialists in craft and the arts examine different ways of responding to rural life, exploring how best to nurture old skills, contemporary creative responses and traditional practice.
This talk by Jack Thacker, the current poet-in-residence at the MERL, will explore the poetics of agriculture.
Admission is free, although booking is recommended.
Entertainment: theatre, music, lotteries, fairs
To celebrate 25 years of ephemera studies Typography is hosting themed open afternoons to introduce university colleagues to this amazing source material as inspiration for cross–disciplinary research and other activities.
We begin with short talks, including by Rick Poynor on National Theatre posters, David Plant on material from the John and Griselda Lewis Collection, and Rob Banham on lotteries, drawing attention to some of the ways ephemera are being used to support research and scholarship. The main purpose of the sessions, though, is to encourage dialogue and inspiration for research bids.
There will be opportunity to look at material from the collections in Typography and to view the a-z of ephemera exhibition curated by the Centre for Ephemera Studies. An online version of the exhibition is at www.a-z-ephemera.org
