Introduction to the Guide to Archive Collections

The Guide provides collection level descriptions of all the manuscript holdings of the Hartley Library and is updated as new accessions are received.  It is based on the published, printed guides, C.M.Woolgar and K.Robson A Guide to the Archive and Manuscript Collections of the Hartley Library (University of Southampton Library, Occasional Paper 11; Southampton 1992), and C.M.Woolgar and K.Robson A Guide to the Archive and Manuscript Collections of the Hartley Library, University of Southampton MSS 201-300 (University of Southampton Library Archive Lists, Catalogues and Guides Series, 7; Southampton 2000), with substantial additions to provide fuller coverage of collections than was possible in print.

The archive holdings of the University of Southampton and its predecessor, the University College of Southampton and the Hartley Institution, dates back to the 1860s, soon after the foundation of the Hartley Institution.  That said, over 95% of the present holdings of manuscripts, which now number some 6 million items, have been received since March 1983: it is largely the results of these recent decades of collecting that are represented in the Guide.  Further information is available on the development of the collections at Southampton.

The On-line Guide is a searchable database which is divided into sections of catalogue entries in numerical sequence.  Within sections, each record - effectively a summary level description of the collection - contains data prepared with the General International Standard Archival Description (ISAD(G)), adopted by the International Council of Archives in Stockholm in 1993.  The University of Southampton has contributed archive descriptions found in the Guide database to the Archives Hub.  Information on the structure of the data can be found elsewhere.

The Web Page Guide is a browsable version of this Guide which contains the text of the printed guides to the collections.  The entries have been split up with one web page per manuscript collection, except MS116 which has been sub-divided.