Lockdown Discoveries is an exhibition created by the Rare Books & Special Collections Cataloguing Project Team to highlight the weird and wonderful items they discovered while working from home during the Library shutdown.

The exhibition opened on Monday 7 December and is located in Rare Books & Special Collections (RBSC) on Level 1 of the Fisher Library (see open hours below). As Fisher Library is only open to current staff and students, we’ve also provided an online component: a series of blog posts about the exhibition, released weekly.

Read Part 1
Read Part 2
Read Part 3

How did the exhibition happen?

As the saying goes, there is always a silver lining! The COVID-19 pandemic has changed our lives significantly, especially our way of work. The RBSC Cataloguing Project Team has taken on the challenge presented by COVID-19 in its stride. While working remotely during the shutdown, the team catalogued 18,773 items!

Despite working separately in their own physical spaces, the team came together online to marvel at the diversity and magnitude of the collection, admiring striking cover art and bookplates, hypothesising about intriguing inscriptions, showing each other all the weird and wonderful material they came across … And then we pondered, how could we take these treasures to a wider audience?

That’s how Lockdown Discoveries came into being. This exhibition will showcase the highlights from the Graham Science Fiction collection, handpicked and curated by the RBSC Cataloguing Project Team.

Rare Books & Special Collections
Open: Monday to Friday, 11am to 3pm
Phone: +61 2 9351 2992
Email: rarebook.library@sydney.edu.au