Skip to Main Content

University of Sunderland Library

Special Collections

Delve into the history and story of our Special Collections

Picture of Kate Adie       Kate Adie Collection

Kate Adie OBE grew up in Sunderland and later became Chief News Correspondent at the BBC.

"The city has a wonderful history and growing up in cities like Sunderland does shape you, it makes you the person you are. Sunderland shaped me. It is all to do with where I come from, and I feel very strongly about that."  Kate Adie, 2024

Kate's collection relates to her professional life, documenting a trailblazing broadcast journalism career covering major world events and reporting from war and combat zones, including the Gulf and the former Yugoslavia. Kate's reasons for depositing her archive with the University of Sunderland are to preserve a record of her professional career and to promote scholarship and research within the humanities and social sciences. The collection is a unique archive of documents, reporters' notebooks, photographs, BBC news clips and artefacts relating to Kate's career and placed on indefinite loan with the University Library. Kate continues to add material to the collection.

Kate's published works include: The Kindness of Strangers, Corsets to Camouflage, Into Danger, and Nobody's Child.

Kate maintains connections with Sunderland, referencing the city throughout her books. Kate holds honorary degrees from a number of universities and is Honorary Professor of Journalism at the University of Sunderland. She was awarded an OBE in 1993 and a CBE in 2018.  She won the Richard Dimbleby Award from BAFTA in 1990 and was awarded a BAFTA Fellowship in 2018.

Due to the unique character of the material in our collections, most items from the Kate Adie Collection must be viewed in the Special Collections Reading Room. The exceptions to this are the collection of nearly 1200 BBC television news clips and programmes and the thematic collections of digitised material that are available to view remotely. 

The University of Sunderland has recently completed a project to catalogue the Kate Adie Collection using grant funding from Archives Revealed. To search the collection, please use the Kate Adie Collection catalogue. Completion of this project provides an exciting opportunity to open the collection for wider and more inclusive engagement and interest, within the University of Sunderland's teaching, learning and research, and also locally and nationally.

Searching the Kate Adie Collection

Search tips

  • Not every catalogue record in the Kate Adie Collection has the name Kate Adie in it. This is because of the way a multi-level archive catalogue is structured – information is summarised up at the highest possible level and then not duplicated at lower levels. TIP: To confine a search to the Kate Adie Collection, use the advanced search feature. Enter KA* in the Ref No field together with your search term in the title or description field. 

  • It has not yet been possible to catalogue every single item in the Collection in exhaustive detail. Some descriptions summarise a container or a series of materials. This means that if you are looking for something relating to a particular place, it is not as simple as typing a word into a search engine and all relevant information will appear in a neat list of results… although that’s not a bad place to start! It will take a bit of searching through the catalogue and then browsing through the records themselves. TIP: For example, if you are Interested in the US bombing of Libya in 1986, then it is worth looking through the notebooks, correspondence, and photograph albums for that date to see if there is relevant material that has not been picked out in the catalogue entry.  

  • It is also worth thinking laterally in your search strategy. TIP: For example, if you are interested in material on the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, try that as an initial search, but also look at material on either side of your search results, and also think about where and when the event took place – Beijing, China, 1989 – and use those as your next searches. 

  • The search function can be picky about whole-word searching. TIP: Use an asterisk at the end of your search term to keep your search broad. For example, if you are not sure if the catalogue entry might be Bosnia or Bosnian, try Bosnia* to catch both.

It may also be helpful to be aware of the cataloguing conventions we have used: 

  • We have used Wikipedia titles or common Google search terms for names and events where available.   

  • We have expanded most abbreviations, except UK for the United Kingdom, USA for the United States of America, and the Soviet Union for the USSR. The First World War and the Second World War have been used in preference to World War One and World War Two. The exception is where these terms form part of the title of a published work. 

  • We have catalogued names as found in the document or object, but put later names or titles in brackets afterwards, e.g. Upper Volta (Burkina Faso).