Held on 30th September every year and organised by Sporting Heritage, the day, established in 2014, is a campaign geared towards celebrating and raising awareness about all sporting collections held in the UK.
By way of celebrating the day here is a sports heritage round-up showcasing some of our sporting blog posts that capture the diversity of our prestigious sporting collections, how they are used across the university and some highlights of the past year — which has seen this section of our holdings grow considerably thanks to our close collaboration with the International Centre for Sport History and Culture at DMU. Click on the links for more details and images.
First up, is the fabulous launch event, held in March 2018, celebrating the official arrival of the Ski Club of Great Britain collection to DMU:
This wonderful collection has already started to feature in our teaching events and was the focus of a postgraduate project for the Sporting Heritage module for an MA programme ran by the Faculty of Business and Law. An assignment produced by one of its students is featured on our guest blog page, which you can read here.
In addition to the collection being used for teaching and scholarly research, we now contribute to a regular back page feature called ‘From the Archive’ in Ski + Board magazine that is dedicated to showcasing an item and relaying to its readers SCGB’s amazing heritage. This month’s focus was on the collection’s move to DMU and Dry Slope Skiing 1950s style!
Ski + Board October, 2018
Next up is a post about how our England Boxing collection, formerly known as the Amateur Boxing Association, has featured in teaching workshops for postgraduate students on the MA programme. This collection was also used for a pop-up exhibition in the Heritage Centre.
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- Trophies and Boxing Gloves
Highlights from the England Boxing collection
Another sporting highlight for Special Collections this year was the arrival of the papers of the Leicester Riders Basketball Club, the oldest operating team in the UK.
Leicester Riders Basketball Club Collection
The Special Olympics was held in Leicester in 2009, and as such we are fortunate to have a a selection of documents, photographs and ephemera associated with the event.
Special Olympics 2009
Other archival collections include Sports in Leicester (papers relating to Chris Pyatt), the Papers of Norman Chester, deputy chair of the Football Trust and boxer, Jack Greenstock.
As well as our archival collections we also have the library of Malcolm Tozer, a housemaster and author of books on Physical Education, and a large selection of sports magazines, such as Cycling Weekly, Athletics Today, Runner’s World and World Sports:
World Sports, 1962
All in all, our sporting heritage collections are an amazing resource for students, scholars and enthusiasts. If you would like to know more about any of these collections then please don’t hesitate to contact us.
Blog posts within blog posts!
Natalie