Celebrating CAIS Graduates

Congratulations to all 21 students from the Centre for Archive and Information Studies students who graduated on Wednesday 16th November. The University of Dundee held a special Winter Graduation ceremony for the first time this year and several of our students took the opportunity to attend.

CAIS graduates outside Caird Hall, Dundee

Very well done also to Durham Burt, the third CAIS Trainee, who graduated with an MLitt Archives and Records Management with distinction.

Durham Burt, CAIS Trainee

Students qualified with the following degrees:

• Postgraduate Certificate in Archival Studies
• Postgraduate Certificate in Digital Recordkeeping
• Postgraduate Certificate in Family and Local History
• Postgraduate Diploma in Archives and Records Management
• Masters of Letters / Science in Archives and Records Management
• Master of Science in Record Management and Digital Preservation

Caird Hall, Dundee

CAIS is still accepting applications for the 21 online courses it is offering in January covering family history, archives and / or records management, information compliance and digital preservation. Courses last from six to 15 weeks, are tutored by experts and are delivered fully online. Applications for Masters degrees in these subjects are welcomed and we accept applicants from the UK and overseas. For more information see www.dundee.ac.uk/cais or contact armtraining@dundee.ac.uk

World War Exhibition

To commemorate Remembrance Day Archive Services have mounted a small exhibition of material relating to the World Wars. The focus is partly on men and women who served in the British and French Red Cross, some of the 'unsung heroes' of the wars.

James Blackburn Wilson (1888-1961) served in France with the ambulance service, he survived the war and returned to Alva to the family woollen manufacturing business. The exhibition includes photographs of Wilson tending wounded soldiers and letters to his parents.

Other material in the exhibition includes papers from the collection of Margot Cox (1905-1983) who served with the British Red Cross in Italy during the Second World War and was awarded a medal for distinguished war service.  There is also a fascinating sketch and poetry book created by soldier patients at Monifieth Red Cross Hospital during the First World War.

Archive Services holds many collections relating to hospitals in the area. The exhibition features material from the Bridge of Earn Hospital which was built by the Emergency Medical Service to treat war casualties. The papers include Department of Health information leaflets advising on what to do in the case of enemy attack and treating war wounds with penicillin.

Also on display are items from the Joseph Lee archive. Lee (1876-1949) was a journalist from Dundee who served in the First World War. He was an early war poet, who wrote about his experiences in the trenches and was published in the UK and overseas. He was captured and became a prisoner of war and the exhibition shows pages from the diaries that he wrote while in captivity.

The exhibition is on display outside the Archive Services’ searchroom and for more information please contact archives@dundee.ac.uk.

Jennifer Johnstone, Archive Services

University Culture Day

PLACE, SPACE AND TIME

On Wednesday 9th November the University of Dundee's Culture & Arts Forum presents the seventh annual Culture Day, featuring a variety of fascinating talks and presentations, this year on the theme of Place, Space & Time.

Our speakers this year cover art, literature, history, geography, biology, astronomy, music and much more - all exploring the same overall theme. The event takes place in Baxter Conference Room 1.36 on the first floor of the Tower Building, starting at 1.30pm. The full programme is below, admission is free and everyone is welcome to attend. There's no need to book - just come along to some or all of the day.

1.30 pm:
Matthew Jarron (Museum Services)
Welcome

1.40 pm:
Susan Mains (Geography)
Moving Image, Moving Place: Islands, Identities and Space-Time Emotions
This presentation will explore the ways in which media images of islands - particularly in the Caribbean - offer an important entryway into new understandings of how we represent emotions, space, and time

Alasdair Hood (Botanic Garden)

“A Rich Harvest of Most Beautiful Plants": A World Tour in the Botanic Garden

The University’s Botanic Garden turned 40 this year. It was ahead of its time in being laid out on geographical lines. Come on a tour of the world's plants and explore our own British flora. 

Brian Kelly (Continuing Education / Dundee Heritage Trust)

A Journey in Space and Time

Find out our real place in the cosmos as we voyage from Dundee to the most distant objects in the known Universe

Philip Braham (Fine Art)

Suicide Notes: From private pilgrimage to public outrage

The artist will discuss his contentious photographic series 'Suicide Notes' that met with moral condemnation in the press, but won the Royal Scottish Academy Morton Award in 2009.

2.40 pm Refreshments

3.05 pm:

Graeme Stevenson (Music)

Space in Music

A look at music that was composed with the position of the audience or the performers as a key feature of the work

Keith Williams (English)

“I have always been given to paradoxes about space and time”

A talk exploring the place of new media in the fiction of HG Wells

Charles McKean (History)

Space and Time - a Revolutionary Theory

Revolutions require the right time, the right circumstances and above all the right place. Do they occur in the countryside? Rarely. For the last 500 years, authorities have been aware of this and designed against it. Yet in 1989 and again today, squares and plazas were crucial to dramatic political change.

Keith Skene (Continuing Education / Biosphere Research Institute)

Of Progress and the Golden Age: finding a place called home

The conservation movement and the Enlightenment had very different visions of where we belonged. We will examine these two schools of thought, exploring the repercussions for us today.

4.05 pm: Refreshments

4.30pm:

Kenneth Baxter (Archive Services)

Time Travel without a TARDIS: Using archives to discover changing places and spaces in Dundee through time

This talk will show how material held by the University's Archive Services can be used to illustrate and understand how Dundee has changed in the past two centuries – its spaces and the people who inhabited them

Neil Paterson (Botanic Garden)

Deep Time and Broad Spaces: Space and Time in Darwin's Theory of Evolution
The strongest evidence for the fact of evolution comes from the distribution of species in space across the globe and Natural Selection demands vast expanses of time to do its work.

Brian Hoyle (English)
Cinema, Time and Space
Through an examination of works by a range of directors this talk will examine cinema's unique ability to manipulate time and space. By combining cinematic techniques with the viewer's imagination, filmmakers are able to extend, compress and elide time; eradicate the distance between locations; and present vastly different spaces to the viewer

Phil Vaughan (Graphic Design)
Comics: 3D space to 2D time
Exploring the technique of using 3D software to digitally create 2D comic art...

5.30: End