Centenary 2026: making our archive more accessible

As we prepare to create an enduring legacy for the next 100 years, a project to delve into our history and make it more accessible has been given the green light thanks to funding from the centenary budget.  

The University Museums and Special Collections Service (UMSCS) looks after our archive, which holds records from our early beginnings as a small art school for local people, to our Royal Charter, to our status today as a global institution.

The team will now accelerate an ongoing project to fully catalogue our archive and take digital copies of key pieces.

This will help us to tell the University’s story as we gear up to a milestone year: of our place, our people, and our history.

By giving greater access to our records to the academic community, we can also encourage new perspectives on our past, uncover hidden gems, and develop a better understanding of the enduring impact of our actions on local and global communities.

Guy Baxter, the University’s Associate Director – Archive Services, said: “If we want to take inspiration from our past we need to understand it. By making our archive accessible and our story transparent we can begin to know better the diverse and supportive community that grew up in Reading, the work they did and the lives they led.

“We share an ethos with our founders, which is the idea of a University as a force for good through the application of our collective knowledge and skills. We walk the same ground as those who went before us and we can all find a story from our past that relates to what we seek to do today.”

About the centenary

This work is supported by funding for the University’s Centenary 2026 project.

You’ll have the chance to share your ideas for projects that could be a part of our centenary activities later this year. Look out on the Centenary 2026 website for future announcements.

For more about Centenary 2026 – and to vote for our Centenary 2026 logo  – visit www.reading.ac.uk/centenary. Hurry, the vote closes at midnight on Friday 22 March.