Apologies for cross-posting

 

Dear Colleagues,

 

The catalogue, accessible through the new website, covers the holdings of the entire research archive at collection level. It then focuses particularly on the collection's pre-1890 London theatre records at item level, and also contains a digital media archive of 2,000 images from the archive collection. The images are attached to the catalogue records, and are also searchable separately. The website also presents for the first time a searchable Picture Gallery of the Painting and Artworks collection.

The three-year project of cataloguing and digitisation was enabled by a generous Resource Enhancement grant from the AHRC awarded to Dr Sophie Nield of the Central School of Speech and Drama, and the project was staffed by Paul Davidson, Kristy Davis and Emily Mitchell, with expert guidance from Rosemary Firman, Richard Mangan and the Project's distinguished international advisory panel.

 

The Raymond Mander & Joe Mitchenson Theatre Collection (MMTC) is one of the largest collections of theatre and performance related materials in the UK.

It owes its existence to the extraordinary lifetimes work of Raymond Mander and Joe Mitchenson, and has at its heart two thousand or more archive boxes containing playbills, posters, programmes, engravings, cuttings and production photographs of London and regional theatres.

 

There are files on every actor and actress of note in the British theatre, and sections on circus, dance, opera, music-hall, variety, dramatists, singers and composers, together with many engravings and pictures. The Collection includes many theatre paintings, as well as set and costume designs and 500 pottery figures. The Collection also operates as a picture library.

 

A charitable trust, the Collection is part of the Jerwood Library of the Performing Arts, based in Trinity College of Music, Greenwich, London UK and is staffed by Richard Mangan as Administrator, and Kristy Davis as Archive Officer/Cataloguer.

This project only represents the first steps in cataloguing the Mander and Mitchenson Theatre Collection. We estimate that the collection contains over a million items of ephemera.