It’s been a long time since there was an exhibition in our vitrine wall which separates reception and the search room. Now though we have the exhibition space full of archival material again for our first exhibition on display in nearly three years. The exhibition showcases just some of the many items from the National Coal Board collection that was catalogued during the Mining the Seams Project between 2019 and 2021.
The Mining the Seams project was funded by the Wellcome Trust and was run alongside Warwickshire County Record Office, with the aim to make collections previously held by the National Coal Board available to the public. As the project focused on health and welfare, you will certainly find topics relating to care, accidents, welfare, and housing in the exhibition, alongside so many others. My personal favourite are the pit ponies, so keep an eye out for those.
The National Coal Board collection was a very large collection and it was hard to choose which items to include, but hopefully the finished exhibition will be a great talking point and show just what a varied collection we hold. I may be a little biased about it as I helped put some of the items together, but I think it looks wonderful!
If the exhibition sounds like it would interest you, then please do come and take a look. It is open now and is available until Friday 3rd February. You can view it during our opening hours of 9:30am-5pm Tuesday-Friday and the last Saturday of the month between 9:30am and 4pm. To double check the Saturdays we are open, please check the following page on our website.
Derbyshire Record Office 
Lovely to see the vitrine in action once more.