A few members of the IHR library staff recently travelled to the IHR’s offsite depository store at Egham in Surrey for the day in order to record the collections’ periodicals that remain stored offsite following the IHR’s move to its new location in the North Block of Senate House in 2014. The items that remain stored offsite mainly comprise pre-1950 journals and periodicals.
The visit was designed to enable us to update our catalogue with an accurate record of the library’s Latin American holdings. The Latin American collection will begin to be re-catalogued in the coming months and this will enable this fascinating and exceptionally diverse collection to be explored in greater depth.
The collections comprise materials from across Latin America, with significant areas of strength in Mexican, Brazilian and Colombian history. Journals and periodicals are collected however, from all countries in Latin America.
In addition, the depository itself is also of historical interest! The store contains many historical gems, with a personal favourite being the old style of library trolleys from Senate House Library that deck the halls of the depository.
For researchers wishing to make use of the offsite collections, please note that items can be requested from the offsite store and accessed usually within 1-2 working days. A guide to the full collection locations of the IHR can be found here: http://www.history.ac.uk/library/collections/collection-locations#offsite
Blog posts on the treasures unearthed during our re-cataloguing of the Latin American collections will follow – so watch this space!
See also: A full list of the IHR’s seminar series on Latin America, as well as links to several podcasts that are available for download from the seminar series, can be found here: http://www.history.ac.uk/events/seminars/323.