In the last of our series of blog posts looking back at the history of Kingston University Archives and Special Collections as part of the Explore Your Archive campaign, we bring our history up to date by looking at the years 2013-2014.
While these years did not see any large new collections come in, our existing holdings have been added to significantly. This has been particularly seen in our Iris Murdoch Collections, with the additions of letter runs from Murdoch to artist Rachel Fenner, literary critic (and Murdoch’s former fiancé) William Wallace Robson, architect Stephen Gardiner and civil servant Leo Pliatzky. The most recent run of letters to come in is our largest, with around 1000 letters and postcards written from Iris Murdoch to friend and fellow author Brigid Brophy. This significant new letter run has recently been made available to researchers in our reading room, and cataloguing is well underway.
Card from Iris Murdoch to architect Stephen Gardiner, on which she has drawn a dog
Other additions included new records to add to our holdings on the history of Kingston University and its predecessor bodies, and significant additions to the Stephen Sondheim Society Archive including a cartoon by Clive Francis of the original cast of Side by Side by Sondheim, signed by Julie McKenzie, Millicent Martin, David Kernan and Stephen Sondheim himself.
We also opened up our photographs from the University’s history by launching our digital collections online site last summer. New material continues to be added to on a regular basis and enables our collections to be accessed by a worldwide audience.
Photograph of Penrhyn Road campus c. 1970s
So what does the future hold? Despite holding hundreds of thousands of items the Archive does not own a crystal ball in order to see ahead. However we will continue to work to enable researchers to access our collections, whether by research appointments, exhibitions, talks or online articles such as this blog! With such major growth in our first decade, we look forward to seeing what the next ten years bring…
