Aston University Archives Centre (AUAC) by

Aston University Archives website

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Dr Sarah Olive

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Senior Lecturer, Communication and Culture

Director, Research Centre for the Humanities

What do we hold? (Summary description)

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If you would like to consult any of these holdings, or if you have items that you think may be of interest to the Aston University Archives, please email us.

The Archives are located in Aston University’s Main Building, SW415 and SW417, and are usually open Monday-Wednesday, 9:00am-5:00pm. Additional hours can be arranged. An appointment is essential to secure a table in the reading room and to ensure materials are ready for consultation.

Email: archives@aston.ac.uk

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If you'd like to know more about the holdings in the archive or the work of the archives centre, please do email.

Aston Originals podcast episode

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The Aston University Archives house materials related to the history of Aston University (1966–) and its forerunner institutions: the Birmingham Municipal Technical School (1895–1927), Birmingham Central Technical College (1927–1951), the College of Technology Birmingham (1951–1956) and the College of Advanced Technology (1956–1966).

The collection includes institutional records, publications, photographs, and objects which shed light on education, politics, economics, society and culture in Birmingham and the Midlands. It also chronicles a variety of trades and professions, reflecting both local and global developments.

Additional materials include newspapers, brochures and records of the popular music acts which performed in the Great Hall, together with videos and slides of the campus as it has been built up - and knocked down - as well as campus maps through the decades.

The archives contain works of art as well as notable objects that reflect changing cultural and societal norms over the decades: for example, a silver platter presented to the Senior Common Room by the Academic Wives’ Club in 1967. Materials are continuously deposited and catalogued by members of the broader Aston community.

Dr Ilaria Scaglia

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Dr Ilaria Scaglia is Head of the Aston University Archives and the Archives centre. She is a Senior Lecturer of Modern History and has an interest in the history of internationalism and the history of emotions.

Celebrating 70 years of the Main Building

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For seven decades, Aston University’s Main Building has stood proudly at the heart of our campus – a beacon of education, innovation, and civic purpose. It has been the stage for discovery, the home of generations of scholars and change-makers, and a symbol of our shared ambition to make a real difference in the world.

On 3 November 1955, Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II officially opened this remarkable building. Seventy years later, we come together to celebrate its enduring legacy and the community that has given it life.

On 3 November between 1730 and 2000, we will have a special event that honours our history while looking boldly to the future. It is fully booked, but you can put yourself on the waitlist through the link.

Dr David Turner

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David is a Lecturer in Transport in Aston's transport team. As a historian, he researches transport and mobility in history and has a particular interest in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Our archivist: James Platt

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James is the Aston University Archives's archivist. He is accredited by both the Archives and Records Association (ARA) and the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP). His journey in the archival world has been fuelled by a genuine passion for preserving history and cultural heritage.

Prof Monder Ram

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Professor Monder Ram OBE is the Director of the Centre for Research in Ethnic Minority Entrepreneurship (CREME). He is a leading authority on small business and ethnic minority entrepreneurship research and has published widely on the subject, and has extensive experience of working in and acting as a consultant to small and ethnic minority businesses.

Dr Sarah Atkins

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Dr Sarah Atkins is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Communication and Culture and Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics

Prof Helen Higson

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Until 1^st March 2021 Helen was Provost and Deputy Vice-Chancellor at Aston University. She is now Professor of Higher Education Learning and Management in Aston Business School, and Associate Dean Aston Business School.

Prof Ali Z. Bigdeli

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Professor Ali Z. Bigdeli is the Associate Dean Research and a Professor of Industrial Service Innovation at Aston Business School, Aston University. He is also the Co-Director of the Advanced Services Group, the centre of excellence in research and practice on servitization and advanced services.

Prof Andrew Ellis

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Professor Andrew Ellis, is Professor of Optical Communications, as part of the Aston Institute of Photonic Technologies.

Paul Knobbs

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Paul Knobbs is the manager of Aston's "Aston Institute for Membrane Excellence", a globally unique, cross-disciplinary institute to develop novel membranes for use in applications as varied as drug discovery and water purification.

Jen Knight

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Jen is the Operations Manager in Aston's School Of Law And Social Sciences.

Railway workers at the Birmingham Municipal Technical School

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From the student records of the Birmingham Municipal Technical School (BMTS) an Aston predecessor, Dr David Turner created this map of the residential locations of railway workers who attended between 1893 and 1899. It shows how the records may be used to understand from where people travelled in from, as well as the distribution of railway workers in the city. The records may also be potentially be cross-referenced with railway company staff records, to reveal how the BMTS shaped the career and life trajectories of attendees.

Green: Great Western Railway

Yellow: London & North Western Railway

Red: Midland Railway

Blue Squares (upper - Birmingham Midland Institute, Lower - BMTS)

Maps reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland (CC-BY)

Georeferenced Maps viewer - Map images - National Library of Scotland

What does the centre do?

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The centre is closely linked to the Aston University Archives and embeds them within the broader research culture within the university, the city it serves and wider research communities.

It has three aims:

Documenting, preserving and sharing the history of Aston University, its predecessor institutions, and the “community of makers” who made them since 1895.

Documenting, preserving and sharing research, teaching, and other activities conducted at Aston.

Providing a forum and a platform to conduct research and to think about the problem of how best to preserve important documentary material and to archive it for the future in a digital age well beyond the confines of Aston University.

Aston University Archives on X

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Aston University Archives on Bluesky

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Prof Mark McCormack

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Mark McCormack is a Professor of Sociology and Deputy Dean Research and Enterprise. He has previously worked at Durham University, Brunel University and the University of Roehampton, where he held various research leadership roles including Director of the Centre for Equality, Justice and Social Change and Acting Director of the Graduate School. He is passionate about enabling inclusive research cultures that produce high-quality, impactful research.

2026 AUAC Conference: Who is Responsible for the Archives?

2026-03-02 15:56:22 UTC

Who is Responsible for the Archives? An Interdisciplinary Approach to Ethics in a Digital Age

When: Friday 26 June 2026, 9:00–5:00 pm

Where: Aston University campus in Birmingham, UK, and online (hybrid format)

Theme: Archives are vital repositories for preserving the past, for documenting the present, and for building memories and legacies for the future. Although they hold relevance to everybody’s history and affect society as a whole, they have long been the purview of a limited group of archivists and historians. In recent years, this has begun to change: archives, both as documents and as repositories, have received increasing attention from scholars across diverse disciplines and also from the broader public.

However, if questions of representation, digital transformation, and long-term preservation have become central to contemporary debates, issues related to ethics remain often limited to legal compliance or confined to a limited group of specialists. Building on previous debates including the US 2018 National Forum on Ethics & Archiving the Web and the ICA’s 2022 Ethics and Archives Online Discussion, and also on the ARA’s ongoing work in this area, this conference seeks to expand this discussion by bringing together experts and practitioners from all fields.

Submission guidelines

Contribution type: proposals for a 15-min paper to be presented at the conference either in person or online.

Submission: please send a 250-word abstract and one-page CV by 13 April 2026 to AUACConference2026@aston.ac.uk, specifying if you would be presenting remotely or in person.

Contact and information: Dr Ilaria Scaglia i.scaglia@aston.ac.uk

Notifications of acceptance in the programme will be sent by 30 April 2026.

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Victoria Uren has worked at Aston University since September 2011. Before joining Aston she worked as a senior researcher on several collaborative projects and as an information scientist in R&D organizations. Her current research concerns applications of artificial intelligence and social media, and the use of games in management education.

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Dr Rozbicka joined the department in 2015, having previously worked as a post-doc and lecturer at the Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. Dr Rozbicka's research agenda focuses on two main topics. The main area of research circulates around participation of interest groups in the European and national policy-making and transposition processes; which includes questions like: How influential are interest groups in the politics? Access routes for lobbyists and their effectiveness? And, regulation of interest groups access to policy-makers. The second strand of research focuses on the regulation of the live music industry in the UK and EU.