Themed Resources for Teaching & Learning
These themed teaching resources offer a curated collection of primary source materials aimed at those designing and delivering teaching and learning OR students looking for a dissertation topic.
Introduction
The University of Manchester Library houses a spectacular array of resources (known collectively as Special Collections) which have great value for teaching, research and general interest. Some of these exciting collections are available in a digital format. You can find all our digital collections here.
Special Collections are not organised thematically by subject but by the creator. This means it is not always easy or intuitive to pull together material on a specific topic without prior knowledge and a dollop of insider information on what has been digitised and where it is kept.
To make things easier Special Collections staff have curated a series of themed teaching packages. Each package offers an edited collection of high-quality digital images that are relevant to many disciplines and for all educational levels, from schools and colleges to undergraduate and postgraduate courses. Items selected are representative rather than exhaustive. For each section there are links to additional resources and catalogue references for featured artefacts. We also end each blog post with a series of ‘Discussion Points’, these are designed to provoke deeper engagement with the source material and the issues they raise.
We decided early in the planning process not to include detailed teaching exercises as tutors will wish to re-purpose, adapt and apply these primary sources to their own specific context and desired learning outcomes.
What are themed teaching packages
The curated themed teaching packages also highlight some of the spectacular rare books, archives, manuscripts, maps and visual collections available for further study at the University of Manchester, whether physical artefacts or digitised copies. It will therefore be relevant to third year and postgraduate students identifying dissertation and doctoral research topics.
Some of the resources were created specifically for a module or course taught at the University of Manchester. They are shared here so they can be used more widely.
List of resources
We are constantly curating new teaching collections and will be adding them regularly, so please bookmark the main page and keep checking back.
If you would like further information on the series or using our collections in a Teaching and Learning context please do contact us.
Student Posts
We are also keen to highlight student work that helps build on topics covered in these teaching resources. For example:
Images reproduced with the permission of The John Rylands University Librarian and Director of the University of Manchester Library. All images used on this page are licenced via CC-BY-NC-SA, for further information about each image, please follow the link in the description.
