Traditionally, the special collections team delivered their workshops through small, group focused, and intimate working conditions in a face to face setting – in locations such as the John Rylands Library. With the advent of Covid-19 this was no longer possible, so the team stepped up to create a new pedagogical approach to delivering their content. 

The team developed an online resource that centralized and provided distance access to the content they would usually show in person, titled the ‘Manchester Digital Collections’. Here they uploaded images and videos outlining the objects and texts in their collections. In order to teach around these objects they created a live teaching space within the John Rylands, taking advantage of the University’s media services expertise to build an effective teaching delivery space for Masters students. In addition to this, the team constructed a course examining contemporary diversity issues using the digital content they had built, which received excellent feedback and continues to be visited well after the cohort had finished.