Archives

Rediscovering the Boots Archive

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WBA/BT/11/15/1/12 – 78-82 Snig Hill, Sheffield store, 1896

by Hannah Jenkinson

In November 2015, Boots Archive embarked on a five year project to re-catalogue the entire archive collection held at the Boots Head Office in Nottingham.  The ambitious project was funded by a Research Resources Grant from the Wellcome Trust, and a catalogue relating to the first two years of the work is now available online.

The Boots Archive collection reflects the history of a high street healthcare retailer from the 1840s. The collection lends itself to multiple fields of interest: Boots has been manufacturing since the 1880s; the company has conducted extensive pharmaceutical research; it’s an early example of progressive industrial welfare, and it has been a horticultural and veterinary medicine producer and retailer.  The company has also operated libraries and cafes, sold audio and sporting goods, artist’s materials and stationery and run cook shops.  Also since the 1930s, Boots has operated more than 1,000 stores throughout the UK, meaning insights from the collection can inform nationwide trends.

For over 20 years the collection has been predominantly used as an internal resource with the team dedicating the majority of their time to promoting and supporting the use of the archives within the business. In more recent years, the Company Archivist started to investigate opening up the collection and expanding its availability externally to academic researchers.

Historically, the collection had been managed in a very simple way, which meant that records would be easy to retrieve.  As the service was internally focused, records had been listed on a database and placed in concurrent boxes as they were accessioned.  This allowed the team to provide an effective reference service to the business, which wasn’t complicated by contextual information or seemingly complex hierarchies and structures.  Unfortunately this was not ideal for users of the catalogue beyond the archive team, and a survey of the collection in 2014 highlighted that one of the most significant challenges to wider access was that the current finding aid was ‘unfit for purpose.’

The first basic requirement for developing access was a relational database which would help impose some structure for users to navigate their way around the collections.  It would also allow users to understand the complexities of the collection with a more structured database.  We chose Axiell’s CALM – a widely used, tried and tested system which complies with professional standards.  It would also allow researchers online access, and provide a sophisticated search functionality.

CAIS 2237 – Boots Athletic Club cycling team, 1897/1898 season

The archive service is linked to the company’s record management system, so when thinking about a structure for the catalogue, we had to bear in mind the constantly evolving nature of the collection.  We also needed to consider the other significant assets within the collection, which include Dollond and Aitchison, with records dating from the 1750s, Optrex Ltd (1930s-1990s), and Timothy Whites and Taylors Ltd (1880s-1980s).  We created a structure to show the relationship between the different businesses, with parent companies showing their subsidiaries, and so on.

We also adopted functions at our series levels to reflect the many and various departments of the company, which makes sense given how Boots has developed and how often departments have moved or changed name, and may change again in the future (this information will be reflected in the administrative histories).  Also functions, we hope, can be easily interpreted by our researchers.

The beauty of having a clearly defined structure with functions and series from the start, means that you can approach the cataloguing in a slightly less structured way.  Creating the structure at the start has allowed the project team to sort through the varied boxes of material and allocate them with a meaningful reference number with ease.  Unfortunately we have been unable to justify the resources needed to physically re-arrange the entire collection, so the ability to at least re-structure it intellectually has been crucial.

At the project’s current point, the team are almost half way through cataloguing 5,000 archive boxes.  We have created over 27,000 entries published on our online catalogue, with over 4,000 digitised images.  There are also over 1,700 people authorities, 3,600 places, and 140 company brand histories available to search and cross-reference to the collection.  Not only will the new resource make access to our collections easier, but the cataloguing process is allowing the team to enhance their understanding of the potential informational value of our records too.

WBA/BT/10/30/24/12 – International product label. Boots’ first overseas sales division was established in India in 1919

To discover the collection visit http://archives.walgreensbootsalliance.com/default.aspx

 

Archives

The Gwent Archives Hospital and Health Records Cataloguing Project

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In November 2017, Gwent Archives was generously awarded a Wellcome Trust Research Resources Grant to catalogue our unlisted hospital and medical collections.

Our project ‘From “A Penny in the Pound” to “Free at the Point of Delivery”: Cataloguing the pre- and post-1948 hospital records of Monmouthshire’ started in May and will run for a year. It is led by a full-time project archivist who will catalogue the unlisted medical collections and retro-convert any existing card catalogues using our collection management software.

The project archivist will be joined in the latter half of the project by a part-time preservation assistant who will clean and package the newly listed records. Our aim is that catalogues for all of our hospital and health records collections will be complete, standardised and feature on the Gwent Archives website by the end of the project.

The collections to be newly catalogued represent a broad range of archival documents that relate to the provision of hospital and health services in (old) Monmouthshire during the 20th century. They include registers; plans; statistics; minutes and staff records from various hospitals in the county. Our work will make the following collections accessible to researchers of all disciplines:

  • The Obstetric Morbidity & Mortality Reports of obstetrician Dr Leonard Alexander Ogilvie of St James Hospital, Tredegar and Nevill Hall Hospital, Abergavenny. Dr Ogilvie compiled these reports between the years of 1946-1979 and they contain a wealth of statistical information on incidents such as still-births, forceps deliveries and complicated labours.

  • Records of the Aneurin Bevan University Health Board. This large 20th century collection is representative of a number of hospitals in Monmouthshire including the Tredegar Park Cottage Hospital which had close connections with Aneurin Bevan and inspired his development of the NHS. It predominantly contains records which reflect the day to day running and activities of the hospitals, for example, ward reports; admission registers and operation books.
  • Caerphilly District Miners’ Hospital. This is a mid-late 20th century collection of maternity records which includes case registers; daily report books and birth registers.
  • A small but varied collection from Monmouth General Hospital containing some fascinating turn of the century archives including a photograph of the medical officers in 1903 and the architect’s design sketches for the new hospital building.
  • The Midwives Records 1943-1968 collection comprising of the professional records of a number of district midwives working in Monmouthshire during this period. The archive includes maternity case registers; drugs books and patient records.
  • A large collection of Hospital Plans representing a variety of Monmouthshire hospitals including the Royal Gwent Hospital and Pen y Fal asylum. The plans reveal the structural designs for the new main buildings and additional wards or departments that were built during the 20th century.

These records, alongside Gwent Archives wider hospitals and health collection are significant on both a local and national scale as they detail the administration and operational practices of hospitals in Monmouthshire during a period of great change in healthcare due to the Great War, increasing use of drugs in medical practice and the birth of the NHS. As closure periods pass, researchers will also benefit from the wealth of personal and professional information on people, places and institutions that these documents contain.
As we commemorate the 70th anniversary of the NHS, it is our hope that the improved access to these collections made possible by this project will inspire further academic and public interest in the history of hospitals and healthcare in Monmouthshire.
Please see our blog for more information and updates about the project:

https://apennyinthepound.wordpress.com

 

Clare Jeremy
Project Archivist

Guest Post

‘Approaches to Opening Up Medical Archives’ and welcome to the Wellcome-funded projects group blog post for HARG

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Victoria Haddock, Wellcome Project Conservator, Boots Archive

The professional seminar ‘Approaches to Opening Up Medical Archives’ hosted at London Metropolitan Archives on 19 January 2018 was an insightful collection of talks around the project management and conservation of two important collections: the Foundling Hospital medical records at LMA and those of the St. Mark’s Hospital Archives held by St. Bartholomew’s Archive. Both projects have received funding from the Wellcome Trust Resource Resources awards to enable their conservation and cataloguing, with the aim of opening up access to these collections – whether by allowing them to be a in a more stable condition to be viewed, or to be digitised.

The Foundling Hospital project at LMA focused on a distinct subset of the Foundling collection which was unfit for consultation and required much-needed treatment to enable it to be digitised safely. In addition to this the LMA was successful in its application for a public engagement fund which will allow a year-long programme of events to link in with the project including an academic conference, events for schools and an exhibition.

The St. Marks collection is over 50 linear metres of archival items which all require full cataloguing, which will begin in February 2018. Their conservation has been worked on since July 2017 by their project conservator, who gave an insightful talk on her approach to working on such a large collection. The usefulness of having the time to thoughtfully and accurately survey a collection was detailed along with an interesting example of the development of stationery bindings from the mid-nineteenth century.

Both were great examples of the variety of challenges that may happen during these kinds of projects and we all got the chance to see some fantastic examples of the conservation work done by the conservators on these projects, from full rebinding examples to more minimal preventive approaches such as bespoke book jackets.

It was a great morning to hear about these projects and sparked many questions and debates. It was also a really great opportunity to meet others in similar situations who have the same sort of issues to confront within medical archives.

The timing of this event was also fortuitous as recently a group has been set up in the hope to connect previous and current conservators and archivists that have worked on short-term projects funded by the Wellcome. Since beginning work on a rehousing project at the Boots archive, Nottingham, in January 2017, I was struck by how many projects similar to mine had been funded by the Wellcome Trust. But there was nothing out there to tell us where we all were and no central body linking us together, even though we were all linked by the Wellcome’s funding and the fact that we are all medical, pharmaceutical or scientifically based archives. This struck me as a wasted opportunity for collaboration as many of us may have been facing the same kinds of challenges and there might have been someone else who has found the answer already and may be able to share this experience.

Personally, as an emerging conservator who has only recently graduated, I was struggling with the context of the project I was working on being the only conservator – and the first and only conservator the archive had ever had – and so was faced with a lot of responsibilities and decisions to make without having that opportunity to consult with a team of conservators with greater experience than me, that others might have in a different institution. But I also discovered mine was not an unusual case at all, there being many conservators out there with short-term project based work being one of their first ‘proper’ jobs after graduating from a postgraduate qualification or similar.

So this led me to begin drawing together a network of conservators, archivists and others, who were currently or had previously worked on projects such as mine. It has been initially a closed group on Facebook and an emailing list. After the event in the morning those of us that wanted to meet up to discuss the group were able to do so by the kind offer of a meeting space at LMA.

Many topics were discussed such as what we want to do with the group, how best to do this, what kind of information do we want to share such as project reports, as well as shorter blogs or images to show what we are working on, and are there any skills or training we would like to get that would benefit us a group and our particular situations. To be honest we only just touched the tip of the iceberg!

Many more thought-provoking topics were raised such as the general nature of project work from both the perspectives of those working on projects and those hiring for and managing those projects, how case studies and reports about Wellcome funded projects are not made available for those thinking of applying for funding, or those currently in that process to give applicants a greater understanding of the nature and scale of what conservation projects might become, and also how archivists and conservators could and should be working together in partnership.

This is just the beginning of what I hope to be a really useful network for people working on short term projects that want to have a place to voice their questions, successes and feel part of a wider supportive community.

If you have any questions about the group or would like to join the mailing list please email victoria.haddock@boots.co.uk.

News

Retreat hospital archive available online

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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.
Events

TIHR 70 Festival programme goes live!

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Posted on behalf of Juliet Scott, Business Development Manager & Festival Director


 

We are delighted to launch the website for ‘Reimagining Human Relations in Our Time’, a festival celebrating 70 years of the Tavistock Institute.

 

At the heart of the festival is the Institute’s archive which over the last two years has been intricately and delicately catalogued at Wellcome Library. These two things coinciding – our anniversary and the launch of the archive – are a great cause for celebration because the insights of our forebears as they tackled past societal challenges are now available to you. How might we take inspiration from their learning as we grapple with today’s major concerns, such as an environment at tipping point, ageing and social care, displaced people and populations, crises in faith, identity and leadership, and our wellbeing at work?

TIHR Festival postcard

The festival website is the starting place for you to join us in these questions with access to a rich programme offering opportunities to take part, reflect, dream, debate, consider, listen and observe, and perform.

TIHR festival programme includes a range of events

With its online booking system and easy to view programme you will be able to curate your own festival experience, keep in touch with festival news, and access recordings, reflections, and photographs posted following each event via the festival’s ‘ArchLive’.

 

We look forward to seeing you in October.

 

Juliet Scott, Festival Director

Eliat Aram, CEO TIHR

 

+44 7950 809699

@jujulietscott