Wednesday 15 January 2014

Archive plans for 2014



Sir Ronald Ross
The Archives team is looking forward to a busy year with lots of events and activities already in the diary.

We are leading on two of the four exhibitions which are on display in the Keppel Street foyer in 2014. In the summer there will be an exhibition and events to commemorate the start of the First World War.  The focus of the exhibition is health and conflict and will showcase material from the archives and current information held by staff on the School’s contribution to conflicts since the First World War. We are part of a network of archives that are working on WW1 events and hopefully we can work with other London institutions on some joint activities.

Poster from the AIDS
collection
In the Autumn, we will be putting on an exhibition to celebrate the completion of the HIV/AIDS cataloguing project funded by the Wellcome Trust. This will bring together items from each of the six collections to showcase the fascinating content of the material held in the Archives. There will also be an event to mark the end of the project – more details to follow.

The Archives will also have input into the Malaria exhibition scheduled for the Spring, including material from the Sir Ronald Ross collection. Ross was the discoverer of the mosquito transmission of malaria and the first Briton to be awarded the Nobel prize for medicine. The Archives holds over 20,000 items including his scientific notebooks, correspondence, reports, publications, photographs and some artefacts including a microscope (which is currently on display in the foyer as part of the TB
Menu from Leeson
collection
exhibition).

Gems from the collections sessions will be held each term which give staff and students a chance to get a closer look at material from the archives and rare book collections. The team will also be running tours of the building for those interested in finding out more about the Keppel Street building and the origins of the School.


In the Archives, we do more than look after the School historical collections. We manage MediaLibrary, the School’s image and multimedia database. If you need an image, just go to MediaLibrary: http://www.lshtm.ac.uk/library/archives/medialibrary/index.html,  log in with your School username and password and access over 25,000 images. There is also a public version of the database and we are always happy to answer enquiries from the public regarding our images. We are currently running a photo competition with the theme ‘Improving Health Worldwide’ which staff and students are encouraged to enter, for more details please see: http://www.lshtm.ac.uk/library/archives/medialibrary/2013_photo_competition.html
2013 Photo competition winner

The Archives Service also deals with Freedom of Information requests which kept us very busy in 2013, the School received 98 in total, which increased dramatically from the 43 received in 2012; and offers a records management service for the storage of records, there are plans to hold Document Destruction days in 2014 which encourage staff to organise and destroy records that are no longer required.

Finally, it will be an exciting year for the Research Data Management Support Service which is due to launch its website soon, other plans include developing the data repository, delivering training events for staff and students and providing more interesting seminars on research data management topics. For further information, please see the RDM blog at: http://blogs.lshtm.ac.uk/rdmss/

If you have an enquiry about the archives, please do get in touch at: archives@lshtm.ac.uk