The Library’s Special Collection & Archives team has recently put together several exhibits that are now on display in the main library space. These displays may be viewed at any time by anyone interested in learning more about medical history and the University. Some of the items are the Goulding and the Hernstein families’ surgery kits pictured here.
To properly date these items, our University Archivist used the names stamped on the boxes and on the surgery tools. This technique allowed her to narrow down the make to only a few years, rather than decades, when different partnerships and business ventures were active.
While researching these items, the University Archivist also discovered a scandal in the Hernstein’s history over the origins of their materials. Because of this, the company was transferred into Esther Hernstein’s name until several years passed and Albert could again be the face of the company. To learn more about this event and the other items in the exhibit, you can visit the Archives and request the old catalogs and histories of surgical kits.
Just in time for National Archives Month, we are proud to tell our community that the Library has exhibits again! The mini exhibits consist of artifacts from the various collections that are housed at the UT Southwestern Special Collections Library and Archives. This first round of materials includes travel surgery kits, microscopes, a medical book from Dr. Edward H. Cary, and more. In addition to the new items in the display cases, we are redoing the permanent exhibit on St. Paul Hospital. Stop back for more on that soon!
The University Archives has begun an oral history project with alumni of the university and current faculty members.
The goal of this project is to record the stories of the people who chose to attend the university and those who chose to work for it. Each individual has a unique story based upon their experiences, and through these interviews the viewer learns how UTSW played a part in their own stories.
If you would like to share your experiences and stories or would like to learn more, contact the University Archives at archives@utsouthwestern.edu.
The Special Collections Library and Archives has implemented a new fee structure for reproduction and publishing of archival materials. This fee is for digital reproductions of the items available in our holdings. It varies based on the type of material as well as the quality level requested for digitization.
The fee applies to users outside of the UTSW system when digitizing images, audiovisual materials, and documents. However, thesis and dissertations have a cost associated with them for everyone.
The UTSW Library has recently acquired the database Ancestry® Library Edition (ProQuest). This database is perfect for both the casual researcher of genealogy and the expert. It is the library version of the paid Ancestry subscription but with a few differences.
Users are not allowed to save items to a new or existing family tree, they may email items or save them to a flash drive.
Forums and advice on how to search for difficult family members are available, as well as forms to print to build your own family tree.
Users may search records from around the world, but please note that records are not translated from their original language.
In fiscal year 2021, Library staff partnered with clients to discover and apply information for clinical, health care, educational, and research purposes, including:
Answering over 2,600 reference questions
Teaching 374 educational events attended by 1,799 clients
Processing over 4,800 interlibrary loans and document delivery requests
Thank you for using the UT Southwestern Health Sciences Library and Digital Learning Center!
In honor of American Archives Month, we are interviewing UT Southwestern’s University Archivist, Chianta Dorsey.
What are your principal duties as Archivist, and in which of these duties do you invest the majority of your energy?
My main mission is to collect, preserve, and provide access to the institutional history of UT Southwestern Medical Center. Most of my duties are devoted to physically preserving these materials but also to making them available to the UTSW community and external researchers. Accessibility is so important because, for all the work we put in to preserve materials, we want people to use them for education, instruction, and research.
What do you enjoy most about being an Archivist?
I enjoy the many people that I get to meet and the stories that they tell. There is this misconception that archivists only spend time with the materials, but I spend a lot of time engaging with people across UTSW’s campus and outside of it.
What are some unique or interesting items that you have in the UTSW Archives?
There are many, but I’ve found Edward Cary’s patient book, from his residency at Bellevue Hospital in New York during the 1890s, to be pretty interesting. Cary meticulously described his patient’s habits and symptoms and even drew charts and data that must have taken a lot of time to write. We have a book related to biomedical research performed during the Voskhod space flight that was led by the Soviet Union from 1964-1965. We have the only known copy since the others were ordered to be destroyed. Lastly, we have essays written by Donald Seldin during his time studying at New York University. It’s very interesting to see his interpretation on some classic works of literature.
What are some projects that the Archives is working on now?
We’re working to roll out our first archives management system. This will be an online portal where people will be able to search, find, and request our materials more easily. I’m also working to organize the Dean of the Medical School records, which provides a nuanced look into the first 40 years of UTSW’s history. While the records detail our immense growth in the fields of medicine and science, it also provides insight into how broader social issues penetrated the campus.
Are there any new directions in which you would like the Archives to go?
I hope to work more with instructors who teach medical humanities electives on campus. I’ve partnered with two medical humanities classes to present materials from the Archives related to the history of medicine, so I would like our role to expand in that area.
We’ve also been working to build our digital preservation program. Much of the materials being generated is born-digital so we want to ensure that we are able to preserve records and documents being created in various digital formats. Our COVID-19 collection, which documents the institution’s response to the pandemic, is our first complete born-digital collection. As of today, none of it consists of physical documents or materials.
How can materials in the Archives be accessed?
If someone would like to view materials in the Archives, they can make an appointment to access them. You can contact us through our email at archives@utsouthwestern.edu to set up an appointment or inquire about any of our materials.
These resources were purchased using Academic Libraries Collection Enhancement Program (ALCEP) funds, which are made possible by the UT System Board of Regents for one-time collection acquisitions. Perpetual access to both resources is now available for all UT System schools.
In addition, Accessible Archives is providing one-year of trial access to ALL of their databases. This trial access ends April 28, 2022.
Both historical resources can be accessed from the individual links above or in Databases on the Library’s website.
As we welcome our UT Southwestern community back to the Health Sciences Digital Library & Learning Center space in May 2021, we’d like to reflect on what we have done to make it safer for you to come back over the last year. The Library Staff of 16 spent a combined total of over 2,250 hours on COVID-19 related projects in the past year. Our list of contributions is as follows:
Planned and implemented the closing of the physical North and South Libraries and then the opening of South Campus Library, including publishing the UT Southwestern Library Re-Opening Guide.
Planned and made necessary changes to workflows and staff remote set-ups to allow full continuation of research and instructional services.
Had multiple discussions and made decisions for additional resources related to COVID-19 for inclusion the Library Guide.
Learned and networked about handling COVID-19 in medical libraries via professional organizations, webinars, and conferences.
Bitty Babu, the Library’s Database Analyst, complied our COVID-19 service hours and provided the following visualizations for our efforts.
The COVID-19 pandemic has uprooted much of life as we knew it over the past months, and this period of time will surely be of interest to researchers in the future. That’s why we at the UT Southwestern Special Collections and Archives have been actively collecting materials related to UT Southwestern’s response to the pandemic. Though the first things that might come to mind when you think of archives are record boxes and printed photographs, much of today’s historical records live solely in digital form. The material documenting the COVID-19 outbreak is no exception, and it is vital that we actively collect this material to preserve it for the future.
Born-digital materials are considered a higher preservation risk because they are subject to corruption (called “bit rot”) and obsolescence (being unable to open files due to unsupported software or file formats). They are also at risk of simply being forgotten about when a staff member retires or files are buried on a computer. Actively collecting born-digital material as they are created is one of the most important steps in preserving these digital records over time.
We have begun collecting a number of different records relating to COVID-19 over the past few months. One of the more valuable digital records currently for the campus is Dr. Podolsky’s weekly and now bi-weekly podcast series, where he discusses the current state of the campus and answers community questions. Though these podcasts and the transcripts are currently available on the UT Southwestern website, there may be a time years from now that the COVID-19 resources page no longer exists. We have been collecting both the audio files and the transcripts to ensure they are preserved in the University Archives.
Lots of today’s information is disseminated through emails, which is why we have also been collecting the daily Emergency Operations Center COVID-19 Update emails. We save the update emails each week in PDF format, and each month we export the emails as a Microsoft Outlook email file (called PST). This allows us flexibility in how we can provide access to the emails in the future, and also ensures that they are in stable file formats that will probably be accessible over time.
During a public emergency such as a pandemic, information is changed and updated frequently so that the most up-to-date information is available. We are working to capture each bit of information as it comes to show the changes over time. One way to do this is to capture websites at a fixed interval so that changes made to the website can be seen. The UT Southwestern Special Collections and Archives became Archive-It members at the beginning of the pandemic to streamline the capture and preservation of websites. If you aren’t familiar with Archive-It, you may be familiar with the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which is a similar tool that allows for the capture and playback of websites. We are crawling many UT Southwestern COVID-19 related websites and social media posts on a weekly to monthly basis. We are also downloading the COVID-19 Forecasting Models as they are updated. These materials collectively can help tell the story of the spread of COVID-19 in Dallas and how UT Southwestern responded.
The first Archive-It capture of the UTSW COVID-19 update site from March 20, 2020
Once the material is in the University Archives, we work to ensure its longevity in a number of ways. First, we ensure that we have multiple copies saved in different locations, so that no copy is dependent on another, and we can recover information if it is lost or corrupted. We also try to stabilize file formats into formats that are better for preservation. Finally, just like any other analog collection, we arrange and describe the collection so that researchers can find information that is of interest to them.
Collecting digital records relating to COVID-19 as they are created ensures that they can be preserved and made accessible to researchers in the future. If you or your department has any digital material relating to COVID-19 that might be of interest to us in the archives, please reach out to Kaitlyn Sisk, Digital Archivist, or Chianta Dorsey, University Archivist, at archives@utsouthwestern.edu.
