Our vibrant and varied collection spans social history, archaeology, fashion and textiles, art and photography.  Highlights include the Welchman collection of local photographs, the Pegler collection of early 3D colour slides, the Carlton-in Lindrick knight figurine, an Anglo-Saxon log boat and fashion from the 1740s onwards.

Our resources relating to family and local history are accessible with prior booking.

Explore our collections here.

Our search facility returns only entries that match exactly the keywords entered in the search box. If you wish to run a search involving a few keywords, we would advise you to search for one keyword at a time.

Example. If you look for someone called Smith, who lived in Retford, please first enter Smith in the search box (this should return 423 records), then do the same for Retford but press the Search in the Results button. This will create a group of 172 records that include both Smith and Retford in the description.

Please note all material is copyrighted and for personal use only. If you wish to use any text or images for publication, including social media pages and interest groups, please contact us first.