Explore the Archive
Founded in 1953, the Borthwick Institute is now part of University of York’s Libraries and Archives. Our mission is to support and expand the University of York’s cultural endeavour and contribute to human understanding through collecting archives, preserving them and making them widely available for research to all people, now and in the future.
Few universities have archives with the range and quality of those at the Borthwick – from the medieval to modern periods, from York to Cape Town, and from Shanghai to Washington DC. We have some of the earliest archbishops’ registers in the world, the archives of path-breaking psychiatric hospitals, business collections including the chocolate factories Rowntrees & Co Ltd and Terrys of York, and much more. Thanks to funding from the Samuel Storey Trust we were able to set up the Samuel Storey Writing and Performance Collection within the University Library and Archives. This has enabled us to acquire a number of archive collections, including those of playwrights Sir Alan Ayckbourn, Julia Pascal and Peter Whelan, playwright and screenwriter Charles Wood, novelist and playwright David Storey and comedy writers Laurence Marks, Maurice Gran and Barry Took.
We support teaching across a wide range of departments and provide work experience and skills teaching across archive and archive conservation work, ranging through digital archives, parchment codices, photographic prints and negatives and reel-to-reel tapes. Our blogs and Twitter feed are good ways to discover how you can be involved with one of the country’s leading archives, whether you are interested in research for your dissertation, helping to create online resources, looking to work with us on a community project, or gaining work experience for your career after you graduate.
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