Archives and Manuscripts cataloguing – April 2010

Three new collections of twentieth century archives dominate this month’s cataloguing highlights.

As described in a recent blog post, the papers of the various organisations that combined in 1982 to form the British Thoracic Society have now been catalogued. They include minutes, printed material and some administrative records; correspondence and other papers relating to the training and examination of tuberculosis nurses; a small amount of material relating to the formation and early activities of the British Thoracic Society; and a 1932 London County Council post-mortem examination book of unknown provenance. The catalogue can be viewed in our online database under the reference SA/BRT.

Another, small, collection relating to tuberculosis was released at the same time as SA/BRT (as related in the same blog post): the papers of Alexander Stephenson Hall (1904-1995). Hall was a Tuberculosis Officer in Middlesex in the 1930s and consultant chest physician for a group of hospitals in Buckinghamshire from the 1940s to the 1960s; he was heavily involved in the activities of the British Tuberculosis Association and gathered material for a history of the organisation (never published). His papers include this historical documentation as well as various writings by on the social impact of tuberculosis. The catalogue can be found under the reference PP/HAL.

Thirdly, as noted in last month’s bulletin, the papers of the International Epidemiological Association (IEA) have now been catalogued. The collection includes minutes and other organisational and business records; corporate records; membership directories and some photographs; general and Officer’s correspondence; printed books, conference programmes, proceedings and abstracts. All this new material can be found in the database under reference SA/IEA.

Finally, as an illustration of the work that goes on behind the scenes in the archive catalogue, it is worth noting that the entire database was modified at the end of the month, to keep pace with recent changes in Library copying procedures (the introduction of self-service scanning and the consequent lifting of the 100 exposures-per-year limit for archive material) and access arrangements. This work involved the modification of over 140,000 archive records; an indication of how fast the database has grown in the 9 years that we have been populating it with catalogue information.