Archives and Manuscripts cataloguing statistics: November 2010

This month's cataloguing statistics for archives and manuscripts, like last month's, are dominated by two major groups of archive records. (New cataloguing accounts for all the records added to the database, although behind the scenes retroconversion work continues on the catalogue of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapists (SA/CSP).)

The first of our new cataloguing highlights is the archive of Henry V. Dicks (1900-1977), psychiatrist (PP/HVD). Dicks’s papers cover two highly contentious topics: sex and fascism. In the aftermath of the Second World War Dicks interviewed many former Nazis as part of research into questions about authoritarian psychology and collective psychopathology. Later, his work at the Tavistock Institute centred on marital dysfunction and the couple as a unit of therapy. His papers comprise 14 boxes and are described in more detail in a recent blog posting.

Our second highlight relates to the archive of Action on Smoking and Health (SA/ASH), or ASH, which has been held at the Wellcome Library since the early 1990s. The organisation is still an active one and thus, of course, generates new material for the archive: recent transfers have now been catalogued and the result is a doubling in size of the collection, now comprising 167 boxes and including material up to the early 21st century. The new material documents a period when the tobacco industry was very much on the defensive, striking back against attempts to restrict its advertising and sponsorship activities. Again, a recent blog posting describes the additions in more detail.

A third highlight relates not so much to new content for the archives database, as to what one can do with that content. Library users will be aware that archive and manuscript material is ordered online using the same system (the same reader's ticket, the same password, and the same interface) as one uses to order books from the stacks. In order to make this happen, periodic movements of data between the two databases have to happen: item-level records - those records that relate to an actual file or volume that can be consulted in the reading room as opposed to records from higher in the hierarchy that represent bigger intellectual groupings - have to be harvested from the archive database, converted to the appropriate printed-matter standard and loaded to the main catalogue. Our last harvest took place on either side of the final weekend in November, and moved over 14,000 new records into the main catalogue, making it possible to order much recently-catalogued or recently-retroconverted material. Collections affected include the papers of Sir Ernest Chain (PP/EBC), Alice Stewart (PP/AMS), the MRC Blood Group Unit (SA/BGU) and many others set out in recent cataloguing bulletins (see October, September and August for some recent examples).

Image: a montage of items from the archives of Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), supplied by Wellcome Images.

Archives and Manuscripts cataloguing: October 2010

Our monthly cataloguing bulletin for October is short: not because of a lack of activity, but because the vast majority of the material newly released to the public falls into two major collections, both already described on the blog.

Wellcome Witness Seminars: as noted last month, the catalogue of material documenting the Wellcome Witness Seminars held over the past twenty years has been subject to a major expansion: recent seminars were added to the catalogue completely recasting the arrangment of the catalogue and doubling its size. This new material includes original audio tapes of the seminars (in some cases, master plus copy), photographs of witnesses and other participants, correspondence, and programmes and lists of participants. The new catalogue was made visible in early October, and described here. It can be browsed in the archives catalogue using the reference GC/253.

Alice Stewart: as noted in another recent blog posting, this month saw the completion of work on the papers of Alice Stewart (née Naish). These chiefly relate to her career in epidemiology, especially on effects of low-level radiation. She worked with John Ryle in the Department of Social Medicine at Oxford and was famously involved in a controversy with Sir Richard Doll over her childhood cancer study conclusions. The bulk of the papers relate to the later phases of her career from the 1970s onwards, although there is some material relating to her earlier activities: there is professional correspondence from the 1960s until the time of her death, copious records of her research activities, and numerous files relating to her involvement in lawsuits as an expert witness on vibration sydrome and on the effects of low-dose radiation. Her extensive travels to speak in both academic and other venues, particularly from the 1970s, are well-documented, as is her support for organisations and activist groups concerned about radiation and the environment, among these the Women's Protest at Greenham Common. Finally, there is some personal and family material, including material on her mother (an early woman doctor), and letters from the poet and critic William Empson with whom she had a relationship spanning several decades.

Finally, a new sources guide was added to the archives section of the website, detailing sources relating to Smoking and Tobacco, and a catalogue record created for this so that searchers in the database could be directed to this listing.

Image: old Wellcome Library printed catalogues, from Wellcome Images.