Tag: online resources

News

Retreat hospital archive available online

Posted on
The Borthwick Institute are pleased to announce that The Retreat hospital archive has been digitised (with funding from the Wellcome Collection) and is now available online.
The Retreat Archive relates to the one of the most important institutions in the care and treatment of mental health patients. The Retreat in York was founded by the Society of Friends and opened in 1796. The archive itself is unusually complete and includes administrative, financial, staff, estate and patient records and consists of bound volumes, loose papers, maps, photographs, artefacts from the museum and a small number of paintings.
Over 650,000 digital images have been captured by the project team – amounting to about 80% of the catalogued archive (note that material relating to patients dating from 1920 to the present day was excluded from the digitisation project).
There is a wealth of material in the archive that can be used for research. To get a flavour of some of the interesting things that staff have encountered whilst working on the project read some of our blog posts:
Or dive into The Retreat catalogue and follow the links that are available to the digital content hosted by the Wellcome Collection.
News

New online resource: ‘Railway Work, Life & Death’

Posted on
Members may be interested to know of a new project, ‘Railway Work, Life & Death’, a joint initiative of the University of Portsmouth & the National Railway Museum: www.railwayaccidents.port.ac.uk

The website features the extensive database of railway worker accidents in the UK between 1911 and 1915. It provides insight into the working conditions on Britain’s railways around the time of the First World War, including addressing issues around the nature of railway work, what actually happened in practice, and changing understandings of occupational health and safety and relationships between employees, employers, unions and the state.

There are also a range of resources, including a regularly updated blog exploring cases from the database, all of which help contextualise work and life in what was one of the UK’s largest and most dangerous industries.
The Twitter feed is also part of the project and features regular content: @RWLDproject
Archives

New resource offers unique insight into life and death in Leeds

Posted on
Visualisations of the Leeds General Cemetery Burial Registers Index

A mine of information for genealogists has been made available online by the University of Leeds Library Special Collections. The burial registers of Leeds General Cemetery are now available for students and the public to access and use for research.

Containing entries relating to the 97,146 people buried at the cemetery, the 25 registers have been transcribed, digitised and made available through the Leeds General Cemetery Burial Registers Index:
https://library.leeds.ac.uk/special-collections-explore/Leeds%20General%20Cemetery%20Burial%20Registers%20Index

The registers record information such as name, age, gender, date of death and burial, cause of death, occupation, and parents’ details. It is possible to browse a full list of all the recorded causes of death and occupations and view charts of key statistics from the data.

Leeds General Cemetery opened in 1835 as a public burial ground. The University of Leeds acquired the company in 1956 and the final burial took place there in 1969, although ashes continued to be scattered there until 1992. Today the site is a public park, its name reverted to the original – St George’s Fields.

The digitisation and transcription project was undertaken as part of the Medical Collections Project, launched in November 2015. The project’s aim is to make medical-related collections more widely accessible, to encourage use, and inspire new research by creating online catalogues and digitising selected items. This includes improving the long-term preservation of this material by undertaking repackaging and conservation treatments where appropriate. The project is funded by a Wellcome Trust Research Resources Award, and runs until May 2018.

The University Library’s Special Collections hold the extensive records of the Leeds General Cemetery Company Ltd. Mainly consisting of business and administrative papers alongside the burial registers, the archive covers the lifetime of the company, with records dating from 1733 to 1992. A new catalogue for the Leeds General Cemetery Company Ltd Archive is also now available.