Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance diaries and boots – as well as the largest remaining piece of the doomed vessel – have gone on display in Cambridge, almost 100 years since the ship was crushed and sunk by pack ice in Antarctica’s Weddell Sea.

Through its Collecting Cultures programme, the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) has announced a £5 million funding package which will benefit 23 museums, libraries and archives across the UK, including the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge.

The vision of securing Cambridge’s reputation as an international centre of museums excellence received a major boost today when Arts Council England awarded University of Cambridge Museums (UCM) nearly £4.5m for 2015-18 and continuing Major Partner Museum status.

The Scott Polar Research Institute has launched an appeal to save Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s ‘lost’ polar negatives. A last minute stay of execution means it now has until 25 March to save the negatives for the nation.

Letters written by Apsley Cherry-Garrard to his mother during the British Antarctic Expedition, 1910-13, will be on display at The Polar Museum until May 2014. The Museum has been lent this exclusive collection of letters by The Richard C Dehmel Trust.

An exhibition exploring human discovery in all its forms – selected from more than five million objects at eight University of Cambridge museums – will open in London on 31 January 2014.