Well, today is the last official day of the British Theatre 1860-1940 Exhibition, curated by the 18 drama students of model DR575. Aside from the task of taking everything down and ensuring that it all ends up in the right place (especailly the captions and extra ‘dressing’ that the students provided themselves), that’s it until April. It will be very strange to have an open reading room again!

Interest in the exhibitions has led to a respectable number of visitors, including the entire drama department staff, all of whom have been impressed by the skills and knowledge (not to mention the sources) on display. From Monday, the exhibition will only exist in electronic form, on a new section of the Special Collections website which we have just completed, and on the websites which the groups put together to accompany their work. All of the students put a lot of time and effort into constructing their websites and we’ve linked these to the Special Collections pages to make it easy for anyone to have a look at the investigations which each of the students carried out.

If you didn’t manage to get to the Templeman to see the real thing, why not have a look at the webpages; there are links from the Special Collections homepage menu.

Of course, this exhibition was only the beginning. After all of the positive feedback we’ve had, there’s no doubt that student curated exhibitions using Special Collections material will become a fixture of the academic year. In fact, the next DR575 module starts on Monday 17 January, and we hope to open another student curated exhibition to the public on Thursday, 7 April, based on topics chosen within the broad theme of British theatre 1860-1940.

So all that remains is to say a big thank you to Helen Brooks, who teaches the module and came up with the idea for the exhibition, and the 18 students who spent (what probably seemed like endless) hours in Special Collections trawling through sources and produced such excellent work: Kelci, Olivia, Abaigael, Bryn, Jonathan, Katie, Amy , Rebecca, Daniel, Alexander, Charlotte, Stephanie, Richard, Rachel, Jade, Robin, Rebecca and Monique.

Watch this space for the next exciting exhibition…