Special Collections Blog: Special Collections Blog

National Sporting Heritage Day 2021

National Sporting Heritage Day is held annually on 30th September. It's organised by Sporting Heritage: "National Sporting Heritage Day is our flagship annual event to celebrate sporting heritage and use the stories it holds to educate and inspire. The day is for everyone involved in sport and heritage from grassroots teams, community sports organisations, museums and archives, universities, schools, and National Governing Bodies across all sports. The day aims to be as diverse and representative as possible and make sports heritage accessible to all" (from https://www.sportingheritage.org.uk/content/category/events/national-sporting-heritage-day).

DMU Special Collections focuses on collecting sports history materials in partnership with DMU's International Centre for Sports History and Culture. You can hear more about this in a recent talk given by our archivist Katharine Short at a British Library symposium, available on Soundcloud.

We have been working on cataloguing four of our sports history collections as part of the Wellcome Trust funded Unboxing the Boxer project. This is due to end in December 2021 so we are working hard to bring the project to completion, especially after inevitable delays over the last 18 months due to lockdowns and other pandemic related problems!  Over the summer archives assistants Jennifer and Emma have been listing materials from the England Boxing collection relating to competitions, including match programmes, trophies, Olympics memorabilia and Commonwealth Games memorabilia. Look out for these new sections of the catalogue which will emerge over the next few weeks as we finish processing them!

Meanwhile, archivist Rebecca is working on organising the remainder of the collection, including administrative files, personal papers and affiliated clubs. In doing this she made herself an impressive box fort!

We continue to take in new sports history collections, including recently a major acquisition from the English Chess Federation. We also took in the papers of Stewart Reuben relating to his chess career:

We also accepted personal papers of James McCarthy, former General Manager of the Amateur Boxing Association of England. A listing for these papers will be on our site shortly!

If you are interested in accessing any of our collections, please contact us on archives@dmu.ac.uk to make an appointment.