Local Collection

A large and expanding collection covering Co. Durham (with particular emphasis on Durham city, university and cathedral) and, in less depth, Northumberland, and the historic counties of Cumberland, Westmorland and the North Riding of Yorkshire.The collection contains over 6,000 books and pamphlets and 3,000 serial volumes. It includes good holdings of early local directories, pollbooks and election ephemera (largely 18th-19th century), playbills, locally printed slip songs, and othersingle sheet items. There are also extensive holdings of 18th century Newcastle upon Tyne newspapers and 19th-early 20th century Durham newspapers, partly original, partly on microfilm. The Library's collections of archives and manuscripts,photographs, and topographical and portrait prints all also contain much material relating to the local area. These collections, and the collection of coins from the Durham mint, are separately described.

The Local Collection web pages can be found at http://www.dur.ac.uk/library/resources/heritage/local/.

The collection is stored either on open shelves or in closed sequences. The browsable and mainly borrowable Local Collection is housed in Room 7 at Palace Green Library, and comprises the modern books and periodicals shelved in a modified Deweysequence (prefix L, L+, L++, Per Local). Early or rare books are held in strongrooms at Palace Green, and can be consulted in the Search Room there. These are partly stored in a modified Dewey (XL, XLL) but are gradually being absorbed into thestandard SC shelving sequence.

Open for consultation.

The collection is catalogued in Discover

Other guides include: 

• 1. Search room index to items printed within the area up to 1860, arranged by place, printer/publisher and date.
• 2. H.R. Klieneberger, Durham Elections: a List of Material Relating to Parliamentary Elections in Durham 1675-1874 (Durham, 1956).
• 3. A.I. Doyle and E. Rainey, Two centuries of the Durham Book Trade, c.1650-1850, exhibition catalogue (Durham, 1990).
• 4. D. Pearson, Durham Bookbinders and Booksellers 1660-1760, Oxford Bibliographical Society Occasional Publications, 19 (1986).

Permission to make any published use of material from the collection must be sought in advance from the Sub-Librarian, Special Collections (e-mail PG.Library@durham.ac.uk) and, where appropriate, from the copyright owner. The Library will assistwhere possible with identifying copyright owners, but responsibility for ensuring copyright clearance rests with the user of the material.