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WORLD’S LARGEST COLLECTION OF FOOTBALL MEMORABILIA UNVEILED
Over 18,000 items of football memorabilia are set to be unveiled to the public as part of the world’s most comprehensive football archive.
The oldest Manchester United programme, Alan Ball’s famous white boots and 1966 World Cup memorabilia form part of the collection providing a detailed football archive with items pre-dating the formation of the Football League in 1888.
The collection is supported by a significant grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund and supported by Liverpool City Council with the collection housed, conserved and made available at Liverpool Record Office in Central Library.
The collection was launched on Thursday, September 24 2009 with the major new exhibition, ‘Everlution: The Everton Collection’ in conjunction with a ground-breaking website (www.evertoncollection.org.uk) and an extensive learning programme.
The Everton collection is extremely valuable both in a monetary and historical sense as it illustrates and chronicles the formation of the oldest Football League in the world. Featuring some of football’s rarest artefacts, many pre-date the formative years of the League.
The launch of the collection is set to be an event of national interest for all football fans alike as it consists of a plethora of items from most football clubs, such as programmes, season tickets, medals, trophies, shirts, boots, photographs, contracts, handbooks and footballs.
With an unrivalled collection of programmes dating from the 19th century, the catalogue is being digitalised and available to view online. With the Everton Club minute books, which cover the period from 1887 to 1964 and comprise 10,000 newly digitalised pages, this collection will provide an unparalleled resource of searchable information.
The Everton collection is one of the biggest projects Liverpool Central library has worked on – with three full time staff cataloguing the collection since June 2008, supported by a team of 15 volunteers.
* ‘Everlution: The Everton Collection‘ at Picton Reading Room, Liverpool Central Library is scheduled to run until April 2011.