Research Room

Charlotte Willsmore: "Welcome to the Research Room at Imperial War Museums. The Research Room is a designated study space where we provide access to our collections. We have created this video to explain to you how you can access our facilities, and to hopefully inspire you as to how you can use our collections. 

The Research Room is located on the second floor of IWM London and is open to anybody wanting to conduct research using our collections.  We regularly welcome researchers who are authors, academics, actors, and artists; family historians, fashion designers, film researchers and students to name just a few of the many individuals who come to access our collections. IWM holds 33.5 million items charting the causes, course, and consequences of war and conflict in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in Britain and the Commonwealth. The material you view in Research Room could help you to deepen your knowledge of a specific conflict, discover more on the subjects raised in our exhibits, trace your own family history, or learn more about an individual’s personal experience of conflict. 

IWM has a unique national reference library of over 150,000 items. We hold material on military units and campaign histories as well as biographies, journals, and newspapers. Our printed ephemera collection contains items relating to the economic, social, and cultural aspects of war and an extensive propaganda collection. Our documents archives cover a wealth of personal experience and testimony. IWM holds over 20,000 individual collections of private papers, principally comprising unpublished diaries, letters, and memoirs. The sound archive holds over 35,000 sound recordings comprising one of the largest oral history collections of its type in the world as well as significant holdings of speeches, sound effects, broadcasts, poetry, and music. The photograph archive comprises 11 million photographs and our collections cover conflict from official, press, and private perspectives. IWM’s own administrative records date back to its foundation in 1917. These files detail the work of IWM in developing collections, planning, and designing exhibitions, past publications, and guidebooks. The unique archive of the War Artists’ Advisory Committee is available on microfilm in the Research Room. This collection reveals the day-to-day running of the war art schemes as well as glimpses of the artists’ own experiences. 

Subject to individual assessment, we can also provide access to some artworks on paper and small objects. To access any collections in the Research Room you will need to book an appointment through our website. Please visit our website to find our opening days and times. When booking your appointment, you can request up to ten items per-day, and this needs to be done at least seven days in advance. Your material is then delivered from our off-site stores to the Research Room for the date of your appointment.

If you have requested to listen to any of our sound collection, you will be seated at one of our sound kiosks in the Research Room where you can access our digitised recordings and listen to cassettes, and CDs.  Some of our collections have been transferred to microfilm, and we have two high-resolution microfilm readers in our Research Room with zoom capability to help you read the documents.

When making your appointment, you can request to use the computer facilities in the Research Room to access a selection of e-resources. These include Ancestry, The British Newspaper Archive, JSTOR, The Trench Journals and Unit Magazines of the First World War, and the digitised Women’s Work Collection. Please contact us for a full list of the e-resources available.

During your visit to the Research Room, you can also consult the books on our open access shelves. They contain a curated selection of items from the library collection including regimental histories, some recent acquisitions to our periodicals collection, and other popular reference texts. We have also introduced a self-photography permit. This is free and allows you to take digital photographs for personal non-commercial uses and other ‘fair dealing’ copying purposes with your personal device. Further details are available from the librarian on duty during your appointment. As you can see from this brief introduction, IWM holds a treasure trove of collections, which are freely available to you.To search for material, you would like to see, and for information on how to book an appointment, please visit our webpage. You can also contact us with any questions via email. We hope to welcome you to the IWM Research Room soon."