Rotherham’s library service was established in 1880 and has been collecting material related to the local area since then. In 1986, the Archive and Local Studies Service was established as a separate service, and has continued to improve and develop its archives and local studies collections.

This online catalogue was first made available through the 'Rolling out the Archives project’, a three year Heritage Lottery funded project which ran from 2005 to 2008, and which greatly increased the accessibility of our collections.

All the archive collections held by the service have a basic catalogue entry, which includes the title, covering dates and a brief description of the contents. Some collections are catalogued in greater detail and list every item.

We are continuing to work on cataloguing our collections and further collections will be added to this online catalogue in future. Paper catalogues are available in our searchroom for some collections.

See ‘Contact us’ if you have a query about our catalogues or our uncatalogued collections.