| Admin History | These papers were thought to originate in A.C. Wood's volume 'A History of the University College Nottingham 1881-1948' and for a long time were known as the Wood papers. Recent evidence has in fact shown that they were drawn together and catalogued by Edith M. Becket in 1929. Becket had removed documents from the filing systems of the Town Clerk. Key documents were re-arranged in a complex scheme using roman and Arabic numerals and letters, which reflected subject-matter rather than provenance. Becket was highly selective, and her judgment about what was germane to the early history of University College was probably very sound, so we should probably thank rather than criticise her for it. Rather than returning these to the Borough archives after use, they were retained by Wood, and given to the University as the nucleus of its archive (ACC 23). The original catalogue for the papers survives as UCN/E/21/9. |