The personal papers of local poet Barry MacSweeney (1948-2000), who was an important figure in the Modern Poetry Revival, include manuscripts and published works, correspondence, literature reviews, poetry publications, photographs and newspapers articles.The correspondence includes a range of MacSweeney's friends, fellow poets and family including material from Clive Bush, Pete Bland, Tim Fletcher, Nicholas Johnson, Jackie Litherland, Maggie O'Sullivan, Eric Mottram, Elaine Randall, Jeremy Prynne and Chris Torrence.

Consists of an incomplete set of editions of the Makaris poetry broadsheet as published by Durham University Literary Society between 1965 and 1971.

Contains of 2 albums of letters, including some by people of local significance like Thomas Bewick, Richard Grainger, George Stephenson, George Otto Trevelyan, Robert Spence Watson and Joseph Swan and others written by such household names as A.E. Houseman, Horatio Nelson, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, William Wilberforce, Michael Faraday, William Ewart Gladstone, Thomas Carlyle, Walter Besant, Mary Shelley, Charles Babington, Garibaldi, Victor Hugo, Ellen Terry and Robert Southey. Other letters include a request for an address to facilitate the delivery of a bear skin from David Walton (1859), an account of the pranks of the 'Borrowlow Bogle' from J. Arkle (1856), the refusal to grant Madame de Bury's request that an officer in the Indian Army be promoted by Richard Airey (1860), a description of his house in China by James Bruce Elgin (1860) and a discussion of French politics and her newly-married life in the country by Frances [i.e. Fanny] Burney (1792).

Personal papers of Jack Mapanje including correspondence, press cuttings, books and draft manuscripts relating to his time as a political prisoner in Malawi, the campaign for his release and the publication of his poetry.

There are over 150 maps in Special Collections. In the main, they are pre-twentieth century and cover areas in north-eastern England.

The Marine Technology Special Collection (MTSC), is a unique historical resource of marine technical documents from British shipbuilding, including the less well documented marine engine building, ship repairing, and ship breaking industries. The collection spans the mid-19th century to 2000, with an emphasis on North East England. The collection includes company documents, technical publications and ‘British Shipbuilding Database’, which is a database of 80,000 British-built ships of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Newcastle University has made a significant contribution to this industrial heritage, while its School of Marine Science and Technology is renowned throughout the world. For over a century, it has played a leading role in the teaching and research of the marine technologies including naval architecture, shipbuilding, and marine engineering.

The MTSC, formerly managed by the School of Marine Science and Technology was transferred to the University Library in September 2024. Visit MTSC’s website to find out more details. https://www.ncl.ac.uk/engineering/about-us/facilities/marine/

L.T. Meade (1854-1914) was the Irish daughter of a Protestant clergyman who later moved to London. She contributed short stories and articles to magazines such as The Strand Magazine and edited the periodical Atlanta but became better-known for her novels. She tried her hand at several genres, including crime fiction, but is most closely associated with stories which targeted a female audience, notably stories about girls' schools.

Meade wrote approximately 250 books and we have about 180 in our holdings which were published from 1878 and as recently as 2003. Titles include: The autocrat of the nursery, The children of Wilton Chase, Kitty O'Donovan, and The Scamp family. The collection was gifted to the Library by Jean Garriock.

The Mediaeval Manuscripts number just nine but include Petrus Lombardus' Sententi

This is a collection of over 2000 volumes and hundreds of pamphlets, covering the history of medicine and a broad range of medical subjects. The collection is rich in seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth-century works.

It includes books from the medical library of noted South Shields doctor T.M. Winterbottom (1766-1859), and highlights include Erasmus Darwin's Zoonomia (1794), John Abercrombie's Pathological and Practical Researches on Diseases of the Brain and Spinal Cord (1828), considered to have been the first textbook on Neuropathology, and several works by the famed botanist, humanist and physician Herman Boerhaave (1668-1738).