Archive Internship, 2018

This week, we welcome a new Archive Intern to the LHSA team and, if you're a regular follower of the blog, you may recognise her!

Hi there! I am Vannis Jones, the latest LHSA archive intern, and like many before me, I too have just completed my MSc in Information Management and Preservation at the University of Glasgow. I have been a weekly volunteer in LHSA for a year and ten months (!), so I am delighted to make the jump to an official member of staff, albeit temporarily. My past projects at LHSA have been extremely varied and have included cataloguing small personal collections, oral histories, drawings of surgical instruments (for more about this, see my previous blog post), administrative haematology records, and more. I have also had the opportunity to use Encoded Archival Description, an XML-based standard for encoding archival finding aids, to catalogue tuberculosis case notes.

At my desk in the office

This internship, however, focuses on a medium with which I have little professional experience—photographs. I have catalogued and rehoused the odd photograph in various smaller general deposit collections at LHSA, but I have never had the opportunity to work with a large body of photographs. In this internship, I will be addressing the photograph cataloguing backlog, beginning first with photographs that have been assigned identifiers using a legacy numbering system. Once these photographs are fully catalogued in line with LHSA’s current practices, I will move on to the body of photographs that are entirely uncatalogued. The fun of photograph cataloguing is that photographs tend to be a bit more challenging to decipher than other documentary evidence. It is not at all uncommon for photographs to have no label, date, or any other contextual information to assist in determining its provenance or writing an archival description. This requires a great deal of resourcefulness and creative thinking in order to interpret any visual clues that are present in the photograph. An example from past projects would be photographs of Red Cross nurses—the designs of their uniforms have changed over time, and by comparing photographs of the nurses with online Red Cross resources, it is possible to date these photographs to a relatively high degree of accuracy. I believe this detective work will be one of the greatest (and most exciting) challenges of this project.

Nurses and male staff member from the Edinburgh Royal Maternity Hospital, 1900s (P/PL3/S/061)

An example from this past week of visual clues – the photograph above portrays staff from the Edinburgh Royal Maternity Hospital and Simpson Memorial Maternity Pavilion, and was found by a member of the public during a house move. It is not labelled in any way, but the nurses’ clothing can provide indications as to their roles. The woman seated in black is a matron, and the other three are nurses. You may notice, however, that one of the nurses has a distinctive belt. Whilst we have not decoded the meaning of this belt, it may indicate that she holds a higher rank or different role from the other nurses. 

Throughout my internship I will also have some exciting professional development opportunities, including liaising with the conservation intern (who you'll hear from next week) on a smaller project or two, visiting other Edinburgh and Lothian repositories, and attending talks related to archives and conservation, to name a few. I am looking forward to further honing my skills I have developed over the past two years during this internship, and I can’t wait to see what fun, quirky, puzzling, and unique photographs await me!

LHSA's LGBT Source List

This week our Access Officer Louise is introducing our new LGBT Source List. 

Over the summer I worked to identify and list LGBT related resources that are held within LHSA in order to create a source list for those interested in the LGBT community in the Lothian area. The result can be found on our website:

http://www.lhsa.lib.ed.ac.uk/source/LGBTQ.htm

Although this list is in no way exhaustive it provides a snapshot of the types of LGBT material we have and which collections they can be found within.

The majority of the LGBT material held by LHSA can be found in our HIV/AIDS collection which spans from 1983 to the 21^st century. Although the high rate of HIV transmission in Edinburgh in the 1980s was due largely to needle sharing through intravenous drug use, LGBTQ+ groups were also affected and the community was heavily involved in HIV prevention, treatment and care.

Safe Sex leaflet from LHB45/2/5/1/4

We hold the archive of the Lothian Gay and Lesbian Switchboard and the collection covers thirty years of LGBTQ+ history in Edinburgh and beyond. There are restrictions on access to call logs, however the collection also contains magazines and publicity materials that provide stories of support, community and activism.

Front cover of Gay Scotland, Nov 2002

Within the Take Care Campaign collection there are LGBT related materials including operational and administrative papers, educational resources and promotional material including posters, badges, balloons and condoms.  The campaign began in the late 1980s as a response to the high rates of HIV and AIDS within the Lothian area and it worked to raise awareness of HIV and AIDS across all communities. The campaign was jointly launched by Lothian Health Board and Lothian Regional Council and was considered ground-breaking and occasionally controversial. This collection thoroughly documents the entire campaign and includes a wealth of visual material, an impressive reminder of the visual aspect of the response to HIV.

Take Care Campaign Postcard (GD22)

In our Lothian Health Board HIV/AIDS Management Team and Health Promotion Department (LHB45) and Take Care Campaign (GD22) collections we hold material from the Scottish AIDS Monitor (also known as SAM). SAM was a Scottish national HIV charity that was launched in 1983 to help tackle the HIV problem in Scotland by providing preventative HIV education as well as offering both emotional and practical support to those with HIV and those close to them. We have leaflets, reports and correspondence that detail the important work of the charity.

Lothian Gay Men’s Project Half Yearly Report. SAM report by L Devlin, S Ross and N Walbran

We do hope that people find this source list useful and if you would like to book an appointment to view any of the material, or if you have any questions regarding any of the material listed then please get in touch. We would love to hear from you!

... and of course visit our website for details of our other available source lists.