Collections - The Common Room
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The Common Room holds one of the largest, most comprehensive, public collections on mining engineering in the world.
It includes many early scientific and technical reports relating to the development of the coal industry and associated mechanical engineering, especially the early work on safety in mines. Prof Margaret Jacob, one of the world’s pre-eminent scholars of the Industrial Revolution, describes our collection as “One of the two most important collections in the world for the study of the birth of the Industrial Revolution”.
Stories from the archive
Get to know our collections with these specially curated packages
Buddle Collection
NEIMME Transactions
The Colliery Guardian
Portrait Gallery
Maritime Collections
Artworks
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Want to volunteer?
Our volunteers work both onsite and online to help make our collections more accessible to everyone. Roles include scanning, transcribing handwritten archival documents and identifying historic photographs.
About our collections
Wide reaching collections
The Library includes items relating to mining of all types, plus related industries such as geology, metallurgy and railway engineering, It includes many early scientific and technical reports relating to the development of the coal industry and associated mechanical engineering, especially early work on safety in mines.
What's in our collection?
We hold over 35,000 volumes dating from 1556 through to the present day, over 600 different periodicals from around the world and over 15,000 pamphlets, technical reports and off-prints. We also have a map collection focused on the Great Northern Coalfield and orefield. This includes maps from the Ordnance Survey, Geological Survey and underground mine plans. There is a large archive collection with manuscript notebooks from the early viewers. In addition, we hold a photographic collection and even some objects and artworks.
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The North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers
The collections were originally acquired by NEIMME who have gifted them to The Common Room to be housed, conserved and protected for the future.
Visit the NEIMME website
Search the book catalogue
Dig deeper
Find out more about how to use our collection
Donating to our Collections
How to donate to our collection
Resource guides
Introductory guides to different areas of our collections
Visiting the collections
Everything you need to know about visiting us
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