Event Details

Interviews are a key resource on the everyday histories of people in the past, and for the Heritage Open Day Festival 2026, we are showcasing some of the collections held by our Special Collections and Archives which include interviews and can be used in social history research...

Interviews are a key resource on the everyday histories of people in the past, and for the Heritage Open Day Festival 2026, we are showcasing some of the collections held by our Special Collections and Archives which include interviews and can be used in social history research. The event will feature talks by the researchers who created these collections focusing on their research processes demonstrating over 50 years of research at Lancaster.

The event is open for anyone to attend. The Archive Research Centre is on the lower ground floor of the Library and has a internal entrance and an accessible external entrance. You can either book online or contact the Library (01524 592516) to book a place on your behalf.

The first speaker will be Elizabeth Roberts who use oral histories to inform her research into the social history of Barrow-In-Furness, Lancaster, and Preston between 1870-1970. Using this relatively new technique in historical research at the time, Elizabeth documented the lives of over 260 individuals across three projects conducted between 1972-1989. The research created one of the most important twentieth-century oral history archives in the UK, allowing us to hear the voices of people born in the late nineteenth century. The physical outputs from the projects were transferred to the Library between 1975-1990. Redacted transcripts from the collection are available on the Regional Heritage Centre's website.

The second speaker is Annette Kuhn who since the 1990s has carried out research on cinema going and memory based upon her large-scale project "Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain", which involved gathering evidence with from several hundred cinema goers of the 1930s through interviews and questionnaires. The research has become a reference point for other research and community work associated with cinema memory and histories of film reception. The physical research outputs were donated to the Library in 2006. In 2017 the project secured funding to digitise the collection and present in online as the Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive.

The third speaker will be Katie Waring, Special Collections and Archives Manager who will be talking about the Jukebox: The Teenage Revolution project (2023-2024) which was a collaborative project between the Library and Mirador Arts, a charity inspired by the hidden heritage of the North West. The project focused on the boom in youth culture which followed the introduction of the jukebox to the UK in the 1950s and 1960s. The project featured a series of engagement activities featuring talks, events and commissioned art works which were informed by an oral history project managed by Lancaster University Library. The outputs of the project were brought together to form an archive collection held in our Special Collections and Archives and are available on the project website.