CAIS Study School, September 2011

September is always an exiting time for us as we upload new and updated course materials to the University's Virtual Learning Environment and prepare for the new semester. The high point in our preparations is the arrival of a new intake of students in Dundee for their pre-course Study School. It's a chance for new students to meet each other and the CAIS staff and tutors, find out how to use the University's online learning systems and to think about the professional issues facing recordkeepers and the theoretical basis for what we do. We really look forward to the Study School and we're excited about the sessions we have planned for the students this year. Everything starts this afternoon and we'll post updates on our discussions as the week unfolds.

Alan Bell and Sarah Wickham, University of Huddersfield and
CAIS Tutor,  leading a session on Records Management, September 2010

Notable University Figures (3): Professor Margaret Fairlie

The story of university education in Dundee has featured many notable women including Mary Ann Baxter, the founder of University College, and Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, who was the first Chancellor of the University of Dundee. Thus it is perhaps not surprising that Scotland's first female professor, the talented Margaret Fairlie, was appointed in Dundee.

Margaret Fairlie was born in Angus in 1891 and grew up at West Balmirmer Farm near Arbroath. In 1910 she matriculated at University College, Dundee to study at the Conjoint Medical School, marking the start of an association that would last most of the rest of her life. After graduating in 1915, she held various posts in Dundee, Perth, Edinburgh and Manchester, before returning to Dundee in 1919 to run a consultant practice for gynaecology, and started teaching at the Medical School the following year. In the mid 1920s Fairlie joined the staff of Dundee Royal Infirmary becoming head of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology in 1936. This appointment displeased at least one male colleague who felt he should have been appointed to the job. Famed for her hard work she was also honorary gynaecologist to Arbroath, Brechin, Montrose and Forfar infirmaries and attended cases throughout Angus and Perthshire

This promotion should have led to a speedy appointment as Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, but moves to appoint her to this position were blocked by the University of St Andrews Court – partly due to on-going conflict between elements at St Andrews and Dundee and partly because of opposition to appointing a female professor. With the Directors of Dundee Royal Infirmary standing behind Fairlie and opinion in Dundee largely supportive of her, four years of impasse followed until the University Court finally granted her a chair in 1940. A popular figure with staff and students, she was noted for her warm hospitality. She retired in 1956, but retained a close connection with both the University and DRI.

In addition to her academic work she was involved in practical medicine delivering many babies and she once suggested that if they were laid out in a line they would stretch from Dundee to beyond Perth. Her work as a doctor also helped reduce Dundee's notoriously high infant mortality rate, and she was involved in the establishment of Dundee’s first ante-natal clinic. Following a visit to the Marie Curie Foundation in Paris in 1926 Fairlie developed a keen interest in the clinical use of radium. Thereafter she became a pioneer in its use in Scotland, employing it in the treatment of malignant gynaecological diseases. She also organised a follow up clinic for the patients she treated with radium, seeing some of them over the twenty years at the clinic she held at Dundee Royal Infirmary. She was much mourned in Dundee on her death in 1963 and was the subject of a number of glowing tributes.

Details of Margaret Fairlie’s extraordinary life and work can be found in a number of our collections including the records of Dundee Royal Infirmary (THB 1) and the University Staff Biographical Collection (UR_SF 1). The old professorial board with Fairlie's name engraved on it (which once stood in the Medical School) is now on permanent display in the corridor beside the Archives.

Dr Kenneth Baxter

Notable University Figures (2): Professor Walter E. Spear

In the second in our series looking at important figures in the University’s past we turn our attention to Walter Spear, one of the most distinguished physicists to have worked at the University of Dundee, and a man whose research made a major contribution to our everyday lives.

Born in Germany in 1921, Walter. E. Spear came to the UK just before the Second World War. After studying at the University of London he joined the University of Leicester, where he first met a student named Peter LeComber whose career would become intertwined with Spear’s own. In 1969 the two joined the staff of the University of Dundee where they would become famed for their research into the properties of amorphous silicon. The work of Spear and LeComber and their research team attracted much interest from companies and groups who saw that it had huge scientific and commercial potential. The research carried out in Dundee led to the creation of the amorphous film silicon transistor. This innovation directly led to LCD technology and the eventual development of solar panels and flat screen TVs. Spear’s work was recognised with a number of prestigious awards including the European Physical Society Europhysics prize (1976) and the Max Born Medal and Prize for Physics (1977).


Spear retired in 1988, and after the sudden death of Peter LeComber in 1992, effectively ended his active research career. Spear himself passed away at the age of 87 in 2008.

Walter Spear’s papers are held by Archive Services (UR-SF 57). They include articles written by Spear and notes for some of his talks and public lectures. The papers also include an unusual collection of letters sent to Spear some of which were sent by members of the public seeking support for their unorthodox scientific theories.

Planned obsolescence

Apple's decision earlier this week to ship a desktop computer without an optical drive prompted Alan to wonder on his personal blog whether this is a sign that CDs and DVDs are reaching the end of their useful life as media for digital information:

The launch of a [new] desktop Mac without an optical drive...put me in mind of the launch of the original iMac in the late 1990s and the paradigm shift in computing which that machine signaled. Back then, Apple were the first to identify that the floppy disk was obsolete; slow, unreliable and lacking the capacity needed for contemporary computing. The iMac was designed from the outset for networked environments and the internet. The rhetorical question Apple asked was 'why would you need a floppy drive if you have email?'.

[Now] in 2011 [we have] the strongest signal to date that optical media is becoming (in computing terms at least) moribund...Software and data are distributed via networks or the cloud and on those increasingly rare occasions where you have no network connection, portable flash storage is cheap and ubiquitous.

[The move away from optical media seems to mark a notable change in the storage and transfer of digital information and will have real implications for recordkeepers]. It's not that long ago that high-quality optical media was being recommended as a good 'vault' for digital information...Similarly, [we are] approaching a situation where we have to keep an optical drive around which can be plugged into a more modern machine to resurrect the only known copy of some important file, in the same way as we've had to keep floppy drives around for some years now...[Does] Apple's decision to ship a desktop computer without an optical drive point to impending obsolescence in the same way that the iMac's lack of a floppy drive did 13 years ago?

Chris Foresman, writing for Ars Technica, has answered that question, at least as far as Apple is concerned:

Apple has drawn the line in the sand: optical discs are out, and digital distribution is the future...

It is important to remember that Apple is only one company and lots of other manufacturers will continue to include optical drives with their PCs. However, Apple has in the past offered a strong indication of the direction of travel in technology and that is why their decision to move away from optical media is so interesting.