Happy Holidays!

We'd like to take this chance to wish all our of our users, students, tutors, colleagues and friends a very Happy Christmas and a safe and prosperous New Year.

With best wishes,

All in ARMMS and CAIS

E-ARMMS Newsletter 18

October 2012

A monthly newsletter from Archive, Records Management and Museum Services (ARMMS) and the Centre for Archive and Information Studies (CAIS) at the University of Dundee.

This is the latest edition of the ARMMS and CAIS newsletter, eARMMS, that we also post here. Let us know if you would like an email copy each month.

In this edition:

1. New Staff Member
2. Doors Open Day 2012
3. The Airlie Morning Post
4. 8th Annual Culture Day
5. Outreach Activities
6. Dundee Science Festival
7. Human Race Events
8. CAIS Update
9. Carnoustie Golf Club
10. Scottish Council on Archives Portal Project
11. The Recordkeeper’s Bookshelf
12. Postgraduate Students Visit Archives
13. Freedom of Information – Changes to Publication Schemes
14. CAIS visit to Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI)
15. Sad News

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1. New Staff Member

This month CAIS was delighted to welcome our new Programme Administrator, Daria Wall, who has joined the CAIS team in place of Angela. Daria is an experienced administrator, and was previously with the School of Humanities, where she was Postgraduate Officer.

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2. Doors Open Day 2012

On Saturday 22nd Archive Services held two well attended tours as part of Dundee’s Doors Open Day 2012 events. Keren showed the visitors round our repositories, while Kenneth gave a short talk on the archives before introducing the visitors to some highlights from the University Archives. We were also able to advise visitors on the availability of sources that would help their own research. We were very grateful that everyone who attended took the trouble to say how much they enjoyed the event, and we look forward to participating in Doors Open Day again in 2013. Remember that the University Archives are open to all every day but Thursday and you can also explore our collections on our online catalogue at www.dundee.ac.uk/archives

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3. The Airlie Morning Post

Archive Services is delighted to have received copies of a rare student newspaper that was produced by the residents of Airlie Hall and that offers a unique insight into student life in a hall of residence during the 1960s. The Airlie Morning Post was written, printed and distributed by the students themselves during the 1967-68 session. One of the founder members, Alan Craxford, was able to make copies of the originals recently and apart from sending them to Archive Services has also made the pages available on the web, along with reminiscences about the newspaper: http://www.craxford-family.co.uk/themetartan/tartantamp.php.

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4. 8th Annual Culture Day

The University of Dundee's Culture and Arts Forum (CAF) held its 8th Annual Culture Day on 3rdOctober. The theme of this year’s event was "Health, Well-being and the Arts" and a range of talks was given by staff from across the University. Matthew, who also chaired the event, opened proceedings with a talk on the art collections of Dundee Dentists. Kenneth represented Archive Services and gave a paper on early female medical students at the University of Dundee. Other participants included Brian Hoyle (English), talking about Carry On and Doctor films and Billy Kenefick and Derek Patrick (History) on Image and Reality and the Scottish Soldier. Matthew is Convener of CAF and Caroline is Secretary to the group.

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5. Outreach Activities

On 26th September Kenneth visited the Monfieth Local History Society to give a talk on the Archives. Kenneth’s talk gave a flavour of our holdings and he then took questions from the audience who were keen to find out more. Several of the society's members are hoping to visit the archives in the future to pursue leads in their own research. On 24th October Kenneth also gave a talk at the School of Medicine’s International Student Welcome Evening to c.60 staff and students on the History of the Medical School in Dundee. Both staff and students were very interested to find out about some of their illustrious predecessors such as Margaret Fairlie, Scotland’s first female professor, and our late Chancellor, Nobel Prize-winning scientist, Sir James Black.

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6. Dundee Science Festival

Museum Services organised various events as part of this year's Science Festival. On Tues 6 November at 6pm, the Tayside Medical History Museum at Ninewells hosted a special event entitled Think Global, Act Local: Dundee's International Role in Improving Child Health. In two stimulating and inspiring talks, Stephen Greene (Professor of Child and Adolescent Health) and Dr Anil Mehta (Reader in Molecular Medicine) focused on Diabetes and Cystic Fibrosis, showing how local expertise is leading international collaborative initiatives to transform the modern management of these important conditions. See http://www.dundeesciencefestival.org/event.full.php?id=118 for details. On Mon 12 and Tues 13 November, award-winning comedian and Radio 4 star Helen Keen returned to the D'Arcy Thompson Zoology Museum for a third year with a new show, The World of Tomorrow. With her usual esoteric mix of stand-up comedy, science fiction and shadow puppetry, Helen transported you into the exciting, inventive and tin-foily world of The Future (by at least an hour).

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7. Human Race Events

The events programme for the exhibition Human Race: Inside the History of Sports Medicine continues. Lectures included a talk on Dundee's orthopaedic pioneer Prof Ian Smillie by Bill Hadden on 31 October and on the ground-breaking experimental physiologist, John Scott Haldane, by Peter Taylor on 9 November. The exhibition has been created by the Scotland & Medicine Partnership and is funded by the Olympics Legacy Trust as an official part of the Cultural Olympiad. It is showed across two venues - the Lamb Gallery and the Institute of Sport & Exercise - until 10 November. See http://www.dundee.ac.uk/museum/exhibitions/medical/humanrace/ for details.

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8. CAIS Update

A number of students recently completed single modules or short courses. They included students studying an aspect of professional practice for their professional development. Others were continuing to gather credits for their degrees. As well as masters degrees CAIS also offers short non-accredited courses in family and local history. Our 'Beyond the Internet' short online courses, which began on 17 September, have now ended and 35 certificates of completion have been sent to those who took part. A selection of CAIS courses are available three times a year. Further details are on our web site at http://www.dundee.ac.uk/CAIS

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9. Carnoustie Golf Club

For some months now, Jennifer has been cataloguing the Carnoustie Golf Club records (MS 329). These include records of the club itself as well as research notes made by Bill Coupar whilst he was writing a book on the impact Carnoustie golfers had on the world. Coupar died before he was able to complete the book but the masses of research notes he compiled along with photographs, correspondence and original artefacts such as club tickets are now fully listed and numbered and can now be made available for the public to use. The last job Jennifer has to do is to input the collection list onto CALM so that readers can search the descriptions online and see what is available.

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10. Scottish Council on Archives Portal Project

Caroline has been involved in a Scottish Council on Archives project to develop an online portal for Scotland’s archive catalogues. The aim is to provide a site where item level descriptions of archives will link to details of the creators of the archives and to the repositories that hold them. Funding is being sought to build in educational and interactive resources to the site. More details on the Scottish Council on Archives activities is available at http://www.scottisharchives.org.uk/

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11. The Recordkeeper's Bookshelf

CAIS is currently developing a series of online resources called 'The Recordkeeper's Bookshelf' in a project funded by the International Council on Archives. Covering the core recordkeeping functions and issues such as appraisal, electronic records and description, the series will provide an introduction to debates and literature relating to the topics. Caroline is currently writing the module on appraisal. Other topics include the life cycle and continuum and preservation and disaster management..

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12. Postgraduate Students Visit Archives

The School of Humanities postgraduate students visited the archives for an induction recently. We discussed the different reasons for keeping archives, their cultural and evidential role and the decisions that archivists have to take when deciding what records to keep. The students were given several archival items and asked to discuss their provenance, the impact their content, context and structure on their role as evidence and their informational content.

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13. Freedom of Information – Changes to Publication Schemes

Alan attended a recent event in Perth held by the Office of the Scottish Information Commissioner on changes to the way that Publication Schemes are implemented in Scottish public authorities. A Publication Scheme is a resource that is required by the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 which explains what information a public body normally places into the public domain in areas such as institutional governance and financial management. A generic model scheme has been developed to replace the original publication schemes for the whole Scottish public sector with the aim of promoting consistency in the information routinely published by public bodies. The Secretaries' Group of Universities Scotland has approved the adoption of the Commissioner's new generic model and Alan is a member of a small sub-group of the Scottish HE Information Practitioners Group which is developing the framework for its implementation in Scottish universities (based on his contribution to the development of the previous sectoral scheme and the University of Dundee's leading role in a consultation response on Publication Schemes on behalf of the sector in 2010).

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14. CAIS visit to Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI)

On 1st November Pat and Caroline accompanied CAIS students on a visit to PRONI’s impressive new building at the developing waterfront of Belfast. The visit started with short presentations by Stephen Scarth, Head of Public Services on PRONI’s marketing strategy, Graham Jackson on access and Iain Fleming on digital preservation. It was interesting to hear of the role of the Public Record office in preserving and managing access to records relating to the Troubles. Glynn Kelso gave us a guided tour of the building which included a visit to the conservation studio where Rose Kelly explained the role of conservators at PRONI and the visit ended in the large purpose built stores managed by Alan Robertson.

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15. Sad news

Pat, Caroline and Alan pay tribute to our colleague and friend, Marion Hoy, former Archivist at Records and Information Professionals Australasia, who passed away recently after a long illness in Newcastle, New South Wales. She was a good friend and an unfailingly cheerful colleague at International Council on Archives Section on Archival Education meetings, of which she was Secretary. We will miss her and we send our condolences to her husband and children.

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Witches, Ghosts and Ghouls

As Halloween draws near our thoughts have turned to the spooky and supernatural in our collections. Notable items include handwritten notes about the execution of the so-called ‘Witch of Monzie’ and the mysterious events that followed. These were found in a copy of Reverend George Blair’s famous poem ‘The Holocaust, or, The Witch of Monzie’ published in 1845.

Kate McNiven (alternately known as McNieven / Nicniven / Niven), the 'Witch of Monzie', was nurse to the Graeme family of Inchbrakie, Perthshire.  It is said that in c 1715 she was burned at the stake, which would make her one of the last women to be executed as a witch in Scotland. However other sources suggest that, if she ever existed, she must have been executed around 1615.

George Blair was pastor of Monzie parish, Perthshire around 1843-1844. His tenure was brief as he was suspended and resigned from his charge. The two documents ('Colonel Graham of Inchbrakie's Account of the Witch of Monzie’ and a memorandum regarding the Witch of Monzie both by Grace Grame) were possibly used by Blair when writing the poem. Their exact provenance and reliability are unknown. Interestingly one implies that Kate McNiven cursed the Ministers of the Parish of Monzie before her death. Perhaps the unfortunate Blair felt he was the latest victim of her curse.

Another Halloween related item can be found in the papers of the writer and hill walker Syd Scroggie which include his account of the ‘Ghost of Moss Alasdair’ and its encounters with Andrew MacIlwraith, Duncan Pitscotie and Robert Calder. Moss Alasdair was said to be a ghost who dwelt on the Glass Cairn and pushed people off, resulting in a series of fatalities.  It seems that MacIlwraith and Pitscotie had an odd encounter with a mysterious shepherd and his black dog on their way to a rendezvous with Calder on the Glass Cairn. Meanwhile Calder, coming from the other direction, discovered a skeleton and sensed another presence in the cavern he was sheltering in. He commanded it to disturb the living no more and after a flash of lightening the atmosphere changed.  At the same time the shepherd his companions were following vanished.

Scroggie presents this as a true story. However was this an account of a real event or is this manuscript a clever work of fiction by its author? We would be very interested to know if anyone can shed any more light on this story .

Contact the archives or visit us to find out more about these collections and our local history books which contain more supernatural stories. www.dundee.ac.uk/archives and archives@dundee.ac.uk

Age of Revolution in the Archives

Over the next couple of weeks level one students undertaking the Age of Revolution module on the University’s History Programme will be carrying out a source based exercise which uses material from our collections relating to Dundee in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including maps and an extract from a Dundee Directory. This assessment encourages students to think about primary sources as well as some of the broader issues relating to the impact the industrial revolution had on Dundee, Scotland and the rest of Britain.

In previous years many students undertaking this and similar exercises have come to the archives to enhance their work by making use of the many other sources we have relating to life in Dundee at this time, and we anticipate many of this year’s cohort will visit us again in the next few days. Some of the collections students have made use of in the past include:

MS 11 Baxter Brothers & Co Ltd. The Baxters operated one of Dundee's major textile works. Their extensive archives include many records relating to the business as well as an account of the early days of flax spinning in Dundee written by Charles Mackie, 'an old mill manager'.
MS 17 The Thornton Collection  and MS 105 The Shiell and Small Collection These collections includes material relating to the coming of the railways to Dundee as well as several plans of Dundee and its buildings

MS 102 The Peter Carmichael of Arthurstone Collection. There are many fascinating items to be found in the papers of one of Scotland’s great factory managers and engineers including photographs of Dundee in the nineteenth century, personal correspondence and an excellent autobiographical account of life and trade in the city.

MS 134 Working Class Life in Dundee for Twenty Five Years, 1878-1903  This study by Dr David Lennox includes much material relating to the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century as background to its arguments on the main period it covers.

THB 1 The Dundee Royal Infirmary Collection has a wide range of useful information on life in Dundee at this time including reports of the work of the hospital and disease in Dundee, patient admission registers and directors minutes. These records provide insight into a range of subjects including health, immigration and working patterns.

KLoc The Kinnear Local Book Collection has a number of rare histories of Dundee as well as publications produced in this period such as the Dundee Directories,  and the Rev. George Lewis's ‘A course of lectures on the physical, educational and moral statistics of Dundee delivered in the Watt Institution Hall in December 1840’

The archives also have many other collections which contain material relevant to students of the Industrial Revolution as can be seen from our On-line Catalogue (http://134.36.1.31/) and our source lists and subject indexes (http://www.dundee.ac.uk/archives/sourcetop.htm). In addition we hold copies of most of a number of useful texts on the history of Dundee in the industrial period which are available for consultation in the search room. These include:

L. Miskell, C. Whatley & B. Harris (eds) Victorian Dundee Image and Realities 2^nd Edition  (Dundee, 2011)
C. McKean, P. Whatley with K. Baxter Lost Dundee (Edinburgh, 2008)
D. Swinfen, A. Smith and C. Whatley The Life and Times of Dundee (Edinburgh, 1993)
C. McKean, Dundee: An Illustrated Architectural Introduction/Guide (Edinburgh, 1984 & 1993)
C. Mckean, C. Whatley and B Harris (Eds) Dundee 1500-1800 Renaissance Burgh to Enlightenment Town (Dundee, 2009)

Dr Kenneth Baxter