‘Book a journey into the past at the archive’

The University was awarded £1,585,000 by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) to develop a new archives centre that will be one of the most technologically advanced in the UK. It will be fully open to members of the public, so that they can delve into its varied collections. There will also be a hi-tech Exploration Space, enabling visitors to sample archival material via touch screens and gesture technology.

The new archive occupies a level of the University’s 14-storey Central Services Building. Adjacent to the historicHuddersfield Narrow Canal, it is to be known as Heritage Quay and will be opened by Gary Verity, chairman of the Heritage Lottery Fund for Yorkshire and the Humber.

Sport, music, politics, industry and the performing arts are among the many topics covered by the University’s archives. In addition to its public spaces and facilities for researchers, Heritage Quay will also house a repository that contains more than one-and-a-half kilometres of shelving, to accommodate more than 300,000 books, documents, photographs, recordings and videos.

Professor Tim Thornton, Pro Vice-Chancellor, Learning and Teaching, said: “The University and its partners have some outstanding archive collections. As well as offering some very innovative technology which will allow those remarkable holdings of the collection to come to life for visitors, whether they simply want to drop by, to browse deeper, or to carry out detailed researches. I’m particularly excited by the way Heritage Quay will be focussed on bringing new groups of people into an active engagement with the archives in new ways.”