New year, new horizons

2018 saw some real highlights for LHSA. In what was a busy and productive year, we were awarded Accredited Archive Service status for a further three years and took part in celebrations for the NHS’s 70^th and the Western General Hospital’s 150^th anniversaries, which brought the collections to wider audiences. Louise (our now not-so-new Access Officer) joined the team and helped us respond to an increased number of enquiries (up 10% on 2017). We made ourselves ready for the new data protection regulation which came into force in May and finished our Wellcome Trust-funded TB case note cataloguing project.

A selection of images from our exhibition created for the NHS 70th anniversary 

2019 will be equally full, in part with established work but also with new exciting and worthwhile activity. We’ll be answering your enquiries, supporting research use and promoting access to the collections through a range of engagement activities as usual, alongside some fresh challenges. We’ll be looking in more depth at the provision of long-term storage for born digital collections and engaging with Edinburgh’s City Deal to explore options for digitisation of our existing paper material – all to support improved and increased appropriate research. We’ll be hosting a brand new PhD scholarship which will catalogue, and open up access to, the Levin Collection (the focus for our conservation internship at the end of last year, which made the collection ready) and we’ll be building on the success of 2018’s outreach programme, expanding our work with community groups and student societies. There’s lots more in store, so watch this space as we continue to blog about the collections and how they are used over the next 12 months!