Culture Day is on its way!

On Wednesday 3rd October the University of Dundee will hold its Annual Culture Day, an afternoon of short talks by University staff from a diverse range of disciplines. This will be the 8th year of an event which has proved to be highly popular both within the University and with the wider public. The theme of this year’s event is ‘Feeling Good? - Health, Well-Being and the Arts’ and it will feature  ten presentations which examine the connections between culture & the arts and health & well-being.

As in previous years staff from Archive Services and Museum Services will be among the speakers. Museum Curator Matthew Jarron will open proceedings with a talk on the remarkable story of art collecting by Dundee dentists in the 19^th and 20^th centuries.  Later Archive Service’s Kenneth Baxter will use materials held in the archives to examine the stories of some of Dundee’s early female doctors and medical graduates and the impact they made upon the city and the wider world. Other speakers include Beth Lord, Brian Hoyle, Billy Kenfeick, Derek Partick and Sandra Wilson.

Culture day is organised by the University’s Culture and Arts Forum (CAF), an informal network  developed to support and promote the various departments within the University that are involved in cultural activity. Matthew  is Convener of CAF, and Deputy Archivist Caroline Brown is its Secretary.

The event is free and is open to anyone.  As in previous years, the talks will be held in Baxter Conference Room 1.36. The event will commence at 1.45pm and is scheduled to finish at about 5pm. More details including the full programme for Culture Day can be found here:  http://www.dundee.ac.uk/museum/exhibitions/caf/.

The Mission work of Dr D.W. Torrance and Dr. H.W. Torrance in Tiberias.

The Torrance collection, which includes thousands of photographs and colour slides of Israel, Palestine and medical illnesses, has now been fully updated on our online catalogue. The photographs were taken by David Torrance and his son Herbert  Torrance who established a hospital in Tiberius in 1885 which lasted for over a hundred years helping the local communities.

David Watt Torrance (1862-1923) was educated at Glasgow University before travelling to Palestine in 1884 and assisted in the inauguration of the sea of Galilee Medical Mission. In 1885 he returned to Tiberias and opened the first hospital for those of any race or religion in two rooms near the Franciscan monastery. By 1984 there was a fully functioning hospital with 24 beds and 6 cots. In 1890 Dr Torrance married Lydia Huber and they had four children: Gordon, Stuart, Herbert (1892) and Lydia (1894). Dr D. W. Torrance died in Tiberius on 26 August, 1923.

Herbert Watt Torrance (1892-1977) was educated at Glasgow University and joined the Royal Army Medical Corps serving in France and Serbia and was awarded the Military Cross. In 1923 he went to Tiberius and become superintendent of the hospital. He was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons and received an OBE.

Following the declaration of the state of Israel in 1948 the mission hospital became a maternity hospital in Northern Galilee under the Israeli Department of Health. In 1959 the Israeli Government closed the mission hospital and a hospice for travellers was established in the buildings with a resident minister continuing the mission work. Dr H.W Torrance returned to Dundee in 1953 and died in 1977.

These photographs provide a glimpse into the world of both David and Herbert Torrance and their lives and work alongside the Israeli and Palestinian people. The collection of over 4,500 items can be searched online at http://www.dundee.ac.uk/archives/ and can be consulted in the Archive searchroom.

 

We would like to thank our volunteers and Elizabeth Thompson and Hazel Elder for their hard work on this collection.

eARMMS, July/August 2012

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. Staff Member Leaving
2. History Dissertations
3. Local Societies Display
4. Imag(in)ing the Past
5. Scottish Word and Image Group Conference
6. Recent Accessions
7. Photographing Changing Dundee
8. The Great British Story Event
9. Glasite/Sandemanian Papers
10. 100 Year Anniversary of the First World War
11. Returning Volunteer
12. New Archival Standard for Preservation
13. Records Management Update
14. Partnership with the University of Stirling
15. The Archives and Records Challenges in the Digital Information Society (ARCHIDIS) 2012
16. Preparing for September Student Intake

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1. Staff Member Leaving

CAIS said goodbye to a member of staff in July. Ms Angela Morton, CAIS Programme Administrator, has left to take up a post in education. CAIS would like thank Angela for all her excellent work over the past two and a half years and she will be sadly missed.

2. History Dissertations

The latest batch of 45 Arts and Social Science dissertations has been added to the Thesis database for 2011-2012. That is an increase in dissertations of 13 from 2011 figures. The dissertations cover a wide variety of subjects from the Boer War to fallen women of the nineteenth century. A large number of the dissertations look at local issues such as the Tay Bridge and why the 1960’s Overgate shopping centre failed. The dissertations are a valuable source of information as well as providing guidelines for up and coming students. Many also acknowledge the University Archives staff who were thanked for their help.

3. Local Societies Display

Jennifer has created a small display in the exhibition cabinet outside the Archive Searchroom showing items from various collections of local societies and organisations. This is to go with the display boards which were put together by Ruth Macdonald, the HLF funded Skills for the Future Trainee who was with us for two weeks in May. The boards show images from MS 21 Abertay Historical Society, MS 138 The Grampian Club and MS 342 Dundee Art Society. The items in the display case are from MS 155 Dundee Working Men’s Field Club, MS 80 Dundee Naturalists Society and MS 107 Calcutta and Mofussil Scots Society. For more information on all these collections you can search our online catalogue, www.dundee.ac.uk/archives/

4. Imag(in)ing the Past

The latest exhibition by Museum Services in the Lamb Gallery explores some of the many ways that art has represented, challenged and been inspired by history, mythology and our ideas of the past. Rather than straightforward history painting as such, this is about artists who explore issues relating to the past in more interesting ways. Some artists – such as Will Maclean – draw on the history of traditional Scottish and Gaelic culture to make us more aware of the impact of its loss. Ian Hamilton Finlay is one of several artists in the exhibition who draw on classical mythology, while updating Biblical imagery results in very striking works by Edward Burra and Neil Dallas Brown. There are also artworks inspired by archaeology and by the artists’ own personal past. All of the works shown come from the University’s own extensive collections of art, and many have not been shown publicly before. They include oil paintings, watercolours, prints, drawings and artists’ books. The exhibition runs until 8 September.

5. Scottish Word & Image Group Conference

The exhibition, Imag(in)ing the Past, was launched as part of a conference called Excavating Time, organised by the Scottish Word & Image Group (SWIG). The conference examined the various ways that the past is interpreted and distorted through interactions between word and image. Curator Matthew Jarron was one of the conference organisers and also gave a paper called 'Form and Number / Word and Image - Exploring the ideas and collections of D'Arcy Thompson'. The conference was attended by delegates from across Europe, Canada, the USA and Australia and also included tours of the McManus, a civic reception hosted by the Lord Provost and a walking tour of historic Dundee by Adam Swan of the Dundee Historic Environment Trust.

6. Recent Accessions

Recent accessions to the archives include material from the University Cash Office including information relating to flats the University owned in Whitfield; additional material on the Dundee Mountain Film Festival; a note book relating to the Angus Jute Mill; material relating to Duntrune House and records relating to the impact of the creation of the University of Dundee on the teaching of medicine at the University of St Andrews. The last item will be of particular interest to anyone interested in the history of university education in Scotland.

7. Photographing Changing Dundee

As you may have seen on Twitter over the past few months Kenneth has been taking photographs of the area around the waterfront which is currently undergoing extensive redevelopment. By doing this we aim to build a detailed photographic archive of this period of change in Dundee, which will see the demolition of Tayside House and the Olympia, as well the construction of several new buildings, including the striking new V&A.

8. The Great British Story Event

On 30th June Caroline, Jennifer, Kenneth and Keren represented Archive Services at the BBC's Great British Story Dundee event at the McManus. Several people visited our stall to try writing with a quill pen, to take part in our guess the date of the photograph competition and to have a look at some of our maps, photographs and documents relating to old Dundee. We were also able to help many people with their own research.

9. Glasite/Sandemanian Papers

The process of cataloguing the Glasite/Sandemanian papers is continuing. Of recent interest was a bundle of letters written by Michael Faraday and his wife Sarah to a friend and fellow believer who lived in Edinburgh. Faraday’s writing can be difficult to decipher, but it seems that he was losing sleep over the stand taken by the London Sandemanian church – of which he was a member – on accepting back ex-communicated believers. The practice of the church was to accept a person back only once – if they were ex-communicated again then presumably they had to remain ex-communicated forever. Faraday was quite upset by this; the two letters from his wife to their friend were written without his knowledge, and she in them she asks their friend to give Faraday advice based on Scripture. His response did seem to have succeeded in appeasing Faraday. It is little wonder, however, that Michael Faraday found the subject of ex-communication painful. Some years earlier he had been ‘excluded’ from the church and stripped of his eldership – all because he had accepted a dinner invitation from Queen Victoria. The problem was that the dinner was on a Sunday, when Faraday was supposed to be fulfilling his duties at the church.

10. 100 Year Anniversary of the First World War

Caroline and Matthew are involved, along with representatives from History, Mcmanus, the Local History Centre at the Wellgate Library and others, in planning a series of events to commemorate the 100 year anniversary of the First World War. Starting in 2013 Dundee will see a range of lectures, exhibitions and other projects relating to the war and its impact.

11. Returning Volunteer

We are pleased to welcome back a volunteer. Hazel Elder, who was with us last summer, has returned for July and August and is currently working on the Torrance archives. The Torrances were medical missionaries in Tiberius and Hazel is checking the numbering of some of the thousands of their photographs that we hold.

12. New Archival Standard for Preservation

Archive Services staff held a meeting about the new archival standard for preservation, PD 5454: 2012 which replaces and updates BS 5454. Currently temperature and humidity levels in our stores are within recommended levels for mixed collections and Jennifer regularly monitors the conditions with thermohygrometers. We discussed recommendations for the filing and storage of different media, including photographs and PD 5454’s recommendations for nitrile rather than cotton gloves.

13. Records Management Unit Update

July was an unusual month in the Records Management Unit. Client requests were considerably lower than normal which meant that more time could be given over to processing new accessions than in recent months. Mhairi has been able to finalise consignments from Accounts Payable, Cash Office, Research Finance, Environmental Sciences, Careers and Registry. There are yet more consignments waiting to be dealt with from Management Accounting & Planning, Payroll, Residences, HR, Duncan of Jordanstone, Dental Health Services Research Unit and Education, Social Work & Community Education. However, with three audits by the Chief Scientist’s Office looming before the end of August, Mhairi is waiting for the requests to start coming in from Research Finance and will soon be busy scribbling out retrieval forms and searching for the required documents.

14. Partnership with the University of Stirling

A new partnership between ARMMS and the University of Stirling began this month. Alan will work with their information compliance team, providing guidance and support as required, based upon his knowledge and experience as the University of Dundee's Records Manager and Information Compliance Officer and as a professional educator and Programme Leader in CAIS. This is the first formal collaboration between institutions in this area in Scottish Higher Education and we are excited to be working with our partners in Stirling.

15. The Archives and Records Challenges in the Digital Information Society (ARCHIDIS) 2012

Pat and Craig attended ARCHIDIS 2012 in Härnösand, Sweden during August. ARCHIDIS is an Erasmus-funded Intensive Project, which has 14 European University partners. 30 students from the participating universities stayed at Mid-Sweden University and, in workshops, presentations and group sessions, discussed aspects of Appraisal and Social Memory. The current three-year programme finishes next year when ARCHIDIS will be hosted by the University of Dundee.

16. Preparing for September Student Intake

CAIS is currently processing offer documents for the September student intake. We expect to have over 50 new students studying a range of courses with us, including modules on our Masters, Family and Local History, and CPD programmes as well as on our 6 week vocational course Beyond the Internet.

eARMMS, June 2012

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. Outreach and Talks
2. Twitter
3. New Archive Accession
4. New semester
5. Family History Fair
6. External Examiners
7. Zoology Museum Summer Openings
8. Comics Genius in the Baxter Suite
9. Stunning Photographs in the Tower Foyer
10. Canongate
11. Disaster Planning Training
12. Skills for the Future Trainee
13. Medical Students
14. Papers of a Dundee Medical Graduate
15. Calm
16. Volunteering Roadshow
17. Information Compliance
18. Beyond the Internet
19. Records Management Unit

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1. Outreach and Talks

On 10th May Kenneth was delighted to be the guest speaker at a meeting of the Rotary Club of North Fife, where he gave an illustrated talk on Archive Services' holdings. The talk was well received and Kenneth was asked many interesting questions by the those in attendance. Kenneth thoroughly enjoyed the event and was very grateful for the kind hospitality the club showed him.

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2. Twitter

The UoD_archives twitter account has gained more than forty followers in the last few weeks. Regular updates about the work of Archive Services, our collections and the archive world in general are posted by our staff on this account. The CAIS_archives and UoD_Museums accounts are also popular. The former now has over 550 followers while the later has well over 1,400!

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3. New Archive Accession

We were very pleased to receive a new political collection a few weeks ago in the form of the papers collected by Robert Knight relating to Scottish Nationalism. This collection includes material relating to the Scottish National Party, leaflets and news cuttings relating to elections in Dundee and Angus in the 1970s and items relating to Wendy Wood's unsuccessful campaign to be elected Rector of the University of Dundee in 1974. The collection has been catalogued and listed by Kenneth and is now on our online catalogue.

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4. New semester

The 2012 summer semester began on Monday 14th May. 56 new students were enrolled across all CAIS distance learning courses (Masters programmes in Archives and/or Records Management, Masters/PG Certificate in Family and Local History, single-module study for continuing professional development and two non-accredited short courses in family and local history). The most popular modules this semester are Archive Management: Principles and Practice, Archive Services, Access and Preservation, House History and Principles and Practice of Records Management.

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5. Family History Fair

CAIS recently attended a family history fair in Maryhill to promote our programmes and short courses in family and local history and to raise awareness about the University's Archive and Museum Services collections. A presentation from Dr. Craig Gauld, CAIS Administrator, proved highly successful and generated follow-up interest.

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6. External Examiners

CAIS held its bi-annual external examiners meeting this month and welcomed our new external examiner, Steve Bailey, to Dundee for the first time. Warm thanks to Norman Reid for his service in this role over the past five years.

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7. Zoology Museum Summer Openings

The summer season for the D'Arcy Thompson Zoology Museum is now underway, with the museum open to the public every Friday afternoon until 7 September, 2-4.30pm. As well as the amazing range of animals, birds, fish, insects and reptiles from around the world, the museum will also be displaying the first artworks acquired under a special Art Funded project to build a collection of art inspired by D'Arcy's ideas and collections. Further works will be added over the summer.

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8. Comics Genius in the Baxter Suite

Currently on show in the new comics exhibition area in Baxter room 1.36 (on the first floor of the Tower Building) is a selection of original artwork by one of the great unsung heroes of British comics, David Sutherland. David has worked for Dundee publisher DC Thomson since 1959, initially illustrating adventure strips for The Beano including The Great Flood of London, Danny on a Dolphin and Billy the Cat. In 1962 he took over from Leo Baxendale drawing The Bash Street Kids, which he still illustrates today, having created well over 2000 separate strips. He then replaced Dudley D Watkins drawing Biffo the Bear (1969-84) and took over from David Law drawing Dennis the Menace (1970-1998). It was during this period that Dennis became the Beano’s most iconic characters, moving to the front page in 1974 and establishing the Dennis the Menace Fan Club in 1976, which grew to over 1.5 million members. The exhibiton celebrates David's 50 years of illustrating the Bash Street Kids and is being held as part of West Fest. It will be open Mon-Fri 10am-5pm until 22 June and then 1-3pm on Wednesday afternoons until 15 August.

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9. Stunning Photographs in the Tower Foyer

The next exhibition in the Tower Foyer Gallery features spectacular images of Dundee by local photographer Shahbaz Majeed. Born in Dundee, Shahbaz studied at Morgan Academy before taking a degree in Applied Computing at the University of Dundee. He has since worked for the University as an IT Officer with the Residences Office and for the Web Development Team. His photographs of Dundee have been widely reproduced and one of them won him the National Rail Award in the Landscape Photographer of the Year 2011 Photography Competition. The exhibition is on show from 19 June - 8 September.

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10. Canongate

Caroline and Pat visited the offices of Canongate in Edinburgh and brought back a van full of boxes, including publicity material and several foreign editions of titles. Canongate staff have been sent a retention schedule summarising the records that they produce and highlighting the items that should be kept for the archives. The next stage will be to approach their ICT support to discuss transferring electronic records to the University.

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11. Disaster Planning Training

ARMMS staff had a training session on disaster planning using the department's updated disaster plan. During the session they discussed the appropriate fire extinguishers to use for different types of fire, how to deal with wet and fire damaged material, and the best steps to take in response to different types of emergency. Further training will follow later in the year..

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12. Skills for the Future Trainee

We were very pleased to be able to offer a two week placement to Ruth Macdonald who is one of this year’s HLF funded Skills for the Future Trainees at the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland. It was a pleasure to have Ruth with us. Over the two weeks that she was here she prepared a Powerpoint display to mark the 65th anniversary of the Abertay Historical Society, catalogued and re-housed a collection of papers of George Patrick Henderson, a philosophy professor, and produced a small exhibition on local societies using items from our collections.

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13. Medical Students

Caroline took a class of medical students who are studying the history of medicine. This class has been running for several years and an archive session is now a key fixture in the syllabus. Caroline introduced the students to using archives and discussed why they are important. The students were able to examine our extensive medical collections and had a tour of the archives. Favourite items included 19th century coloured pathology drawings, asylum case books and Professor Charles Alexander’s operation books from the First World War.

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14. Papers of a Dundee Medical Graduate

Archive Services recently received a new deposit from the son of former Medical School graduate Hugh Douglas Ross, a Dundonian who graduated in 1940. Ross later emigrated to Southern Rhodesia with his family, having been recruited as consultant histologist for the shortly to be created Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. The material in the collection relates mainly to the aircraft accident in 1961 that cost the lives of sixteen people, one of them the Secretary General of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjold. Dr Ross and an RAF doctor carried out forensic examinations and provided medical evidence for the subsequent reports on the accident. The items in the deposited papers include the reports themselves, photographs and x-rays of the victims, and plans showing the exact location of the fragments of the plane and the positions of the victims' bodies.

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15. Calm

Archive Services is currently in the process of transferring its Calm database to a new server and also upgrading the Calm software itself to the most recent version. Tobi Wood of ICS has been of immense help in installing the software on the new server. So far a 'clean' pc (i.e. one that had never had Calm installed on it) has been used to run the new version of Calm to experiment with the functionality of the software. This has proved to be successful. The next stage is to install the web server software and Michael, with the help of Tobi and the Axiell Ltd help desk, is currently in the process of doing this. Once the server software is running the catalogue will have its own url: http://archivcat.dundee.ac.uk

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16. Volunteering Roadshow

On Friday 18th May 2012, Michael and Jennifer attended a Volunteering Roadshow that was held in the Tower Building of the University of Dundee. This was organised by The Archives and Records Association and was supported by the Centre for Archive and Information Studies, University of Dundee and the Scottish Council on Archives. It was an opportunity for archive professionals to share their experiences of working with volunteers, to discuss how to make the process as enjoyable and useful as possible for all parties and to talk about creating and implementing volunteer policies. It was an interesting day which highlighted different kinds of volunteers with different aims and how different types of institution (local authority and university archives) approach working with volunteers. All in all the day was productive and enlightening. It was particularly encouraging to see how repositories with differing circumstances often faced the same challenges with regard to volunteer work. The general opinion was that having volunteers working in repositories is a positive experience for everyone involved.

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17. Information Compliance

One of the key roles of Records Management Services is the management of the University’s compliance with information legislation such as the Data Protection Act 1998 and the Freedom of Information Acts. The first five months of this year were especially busy with a 43% increase in the number of requests over the same period last year.

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18. Beyond the Internet

31 students have successfully completed Beyond the Internet Part 1 and 13 students have successfully completed Part 2, both of which began in May. To date, three students have signed up for Part 1 and 22 have signed up for Part 2 beginning in September. Beyond the Internet is a six week vocational family and local history course aimed at giving students the skills to develop their own research. Beyond the Internet covers various topics such as church records, wills and testaments, military records, palaeography, educational records, court records, title deeds and maps and plans.

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19. Records Management Unit

As another academic year nears its close the Records Management Unit is being kept especially busy. In addition to student leavers from various Schools and Units such as Engineering, Physics and Mathematics, Humanities and Environmental Science, Records Management now supports other student related units, and shortly will be receiving records from Disability Support Services and Student Funding as well as Residences. These are amongst the newer client departments which have approached RMU for assistance over the past two to three years. They join long established customers such as Human Resources, Academic Affairs, and of course, Finance in benefiting from Records Management help in supporting their work through the efficient storage and secure, confidential destruction of time-expired records. This helps the University as a whole to free up valuable office space and, indeed, to encourage staff to be aware of the records they keep.

Last month RM reached the landmark figure of consignment 500 which appropriately was a batch of CODA files from Accounts Payable. From the Unit's inception in 1998 these batches from Finance have been a constant and regular part of the Unit's work. We are currently at No 507 with consignments from Education, Social Work and Community Education, Human Resources, Research and Commercial Finance Office and School of the Environment adding to the tally along with PECOS files also from Accounts Payable, and inevitably more CODA!