The UT Southwestern Archives and Special Collections is celebrating American Archives Month throughout the month of October.
Beginning October 5, 2020, on Instagram and Twitter, Archives staff will share an image everyday showcasing the history of student life at UT Southwestern and the genesis of the Archives and Special Collections.
Other scheduled events include:
October 7 – Join us on Twitter for #AskAnArchivist Day. Archives staff will be available to answer questions about how we collect and preserve UT Southwestern’s history. Use the hashtag #AskAnArchivist when posing your questions.
October 15 – Chianta Dorsey, University Archivist, will present on the various History of Medicine resources available in the Archives & Special Collections. Register here for the presentation.
October 21 – Kaitlyn Sisk, Digital Archivist, will detail how she’s been preserving UT Southwestern’s response during the pandemic in her blog post “Preserving Digital Records During COVID-19.”
Join us to learn more about the historical resources available to the UT Southwestern community.
Have you published a journal article or submitted one for publication? Are you required to make any supplemental material (e.g., tables, charts, data) available in a public repository? Have you recently presented a poster or paper at a conference? Would you like to make a copy of the article, related supplemental material, or presentation materials available to the public?
If you answered “yes” to one or more of the above questions, then consider submitting your content to the UT Southwestern Institutional Repository, which collects, preserves, and distributes digital material pertaining to the clinical, educational, and research missions of UT Southwestern.
The Library has created the UT Southwestern Institutional Repository Submission Form to better facilitate adding materials to the repository. Users should provide as much information as possible about the submission, and Library staff will be in touch with more information and additional instructions.
All submitted items will be publicly available via Internet access, but copyright of submitted materials remains with the copyright holder.
Soldiers and nurses outside of St. Paul Sanitarium on Bryan Street with tents for military patients during the 1918 influenza pandemic. From the St. Paul Collection, UT Southwestern Archives and Special Collections.
The UT Southwestern Archives and Special Collections invites donations from UT Southwestern faculty, staff, and students regarding their experiences during COVID-19. We are currently archiving the University’s official response to this historical event, but we also welcome personal stories from the UTSW community, and we encourage you to participate, if possible. By recording your experiences and contributing to the Archives, you can leave a record for future generations of how COVID-19 impacted UT Southwestern and how our participation impacted the greater Dallas community’s response to it. Any questions regarding the project can be sent to Chianta Dorsey, University Archivist, or Kaitlyn Sisk, Digital Archivist, at archives@utsouthwestern.edu.
How to Participate
You are free to decide how you want to record your thoughts during this time. Try to share your experience in a way that’s most comfortable for you. Please adhere to state or local stay-at-home orders when self-documenting!
Some examples of materials that you can submit include the following:
Written or online journals and diaries
Blog posts
Photographs
Video and audio recordings
Essays or short stories
Poetry
Podcasts
Suggested Topics of Discussion
Think about what aspects of your life have changed since the outbreak of COVID-19. Some suggested topics of discussion are:
An introduction with your name, area of study, workplace department, and where your are from.
What has been your experience with online learning or the switch to an online environment for student activities such as Match Day or commencement exercises?
What has been your experience working remotely or as essential personnel if you must continue to work on campus or in the hospitals?
Has COVID-19 impacted your research activities? If so, in what way?
What are your experiences with living under shelter in place orders? How has it affected the closure of businesses and other institutions in your local community?
What types of information are you consuming to stay informed regarding the status of COVID-19 on campus, locally, or nationwide?
How were you notified about not returning to campus? What were your initial thoughts?
What discussions have you had with your family, friends, colleagues, students, or professors?
What challenges have you overcome or faced during COVID-19?
Have you volunteered time or donated money to specific organizations that are fighting the outbreak of COVID-19 or addressing underlying social issues stemming from the pandemic?
Has your personal health been affected since the outbreak of COVID-19?
Topics to be Avoided or Discussed with Caution
UT Southwestern Archives plans to make these submissions accessible online to the UT Southwestern community and external researchers. The COVID-19 pandemic is a public health crisis, and your submissions may include your personal health information (PHI). If any of your donated materials includes discussion of your health information, this information is legally protected by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and you will have to sign off on the PHI agreement in our submission form.
It’s important that you also agree not to include the PHI or the personal identifiable information (PII) of other individuals (or information that could allow a third party to identify other people) in your donated materials. This includes members of your family, friends, neighbors, etc. If individuals appear with you in video or audio recordings and they discuss their health information, they will also need to complete a submission form and sign off on the PHI agreement within the form. Please contact us if you have any questions.
Submission Process and Rules
The University Archivist reserves the right to deny or accept a submission based on its content. Please adhere to the submission process and rules detailed below.
Please complete the COVID-19 Archiving Project Submission Form allowing the University Archives to preserve your submission. Upload any materials you wish to donate in the form and submit it. You will need a UT Southwestern email account to access the form.
If other people are present during your documentation and they share their COVID-19 experiences, they are considered a co-creator, and we will need their permission to preserve and share the recordings. Please have any friends, family members, or community members fill out the form if you wish to record with them. If we do not receive submission forms from all participants, we cannot preserve the materials. One person can submit the materials, but each co-creator will need to complete the form along with a description of the materials they appear in.
Do not submit any video or audio recordings where individuals under the age of 18 are present.
Do not submit intellectual property that is not yours.
If your items are larger than the size (1GB) allowed to be uploaded by our form, please contact us at archives@utsouthwestern.edu, and we can arrange to receive your items in another manner.
If you are a UT Southwestern alumni who would like to submit materials but you don’t have a UT Southwestern email account, please contact us, and we can arrange to receive your items.
General information about the UT Southwestern Archives & Special Collections can be found here.
Frequently Asked Questions
What form of documentation do you prefer? We don’t have a preference. Your submissions can be in physical or digital format. Unfortunately, we cannot accept large physical artworks or artifacts at this time.
Can my submission include multiple formats? Yes. If you decide to submit an audio recording, you can also submit photos or videos to accompany them.
I’m not affiliated with UT Southwestern Medical Center. Can I still participate? Unfortunately, we are only accepting submissions from the UT Southwestern community at this time.
Can my submission be restricted from use for a period of time? Yes, you can restrict public access to your submission for 5, 10, or 15 years.
How do I submit? Please see the submission process and rules above for more information on how to submit your materials.
When should I send my submission? This project is ongoing, and we are open to receiving submissions now or in the future.
Will my materials be placed online? There is no guarantee that your submission will be placed online in a digital exhibit or digital collection curated by the Archives. Unless your content is restricted for a certain length of time, it can ultimately be placed online in the future.
October is American Archives Month. This year at the UT Southwestern Archives, we have been busy acquiring new collections related to the institution’s history. We continue to actively collect and preserve materials that highlight the contributions of faculty, staff, students, administrators, and organizations to the social and academic life of the university. New collections always reveal unknown or obscure facts about the campus’ history, its people, and its culture. Some of our new collections include:
The Donald W. Seldin Papers:
The Donald Seldin papers document the life and career of UT Southwestern professor and physician Dr. Donald W. Seldin. The collection consists of 18 linear feet of correspondence, photographs, collected writings, speeches, and scholarly works produced by Seldin during his lifetime. His papers provide insight into the evolution of the Department of Internal Medicine at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, his impact in the field of nephrology, his interest in medical ethics, and his professional relationships with colleagues nationally and internationally. Dr. Seldin’s career at UT Southwestern started in 1951 when he was recruited from Yale University, where he graduated from medical school in 1943. In 1952, he became Professor and Chairman of the Department of Internal Medicine. He led the department for 36 years where he recruited distinguished physicians and researchers and guided the development of his students into Southwestern Medical School faculty.
Donald Seldin in New Haven, Connecticut, 1942
A review of the play, Of Mice and Men, written by Donald Seldin, circa 1938
The Jo Ann Carson Papers:
The Jo Ann Carson papers document the career of UT Southwestern professor and dietitian Dr. Jo Ann Carson. The collection consists of 4 linear feet of correspondence, photographs, writings, notes, reports, ephemera, minutes, and research created and collected by Carson as an educator of Clinical Nutrition in the School of Health Professions for 45 years. Carson’s papers display the growth of the Department of Clinical Nutrition at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, her scholarship on nutrition, her studies on cardiovascular risk and obesity, and her work with organizations such as the American Cancer Society and the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. Carson began her career at UT Southwestern in 1974 as an Instructor in the Department of Nutrition and Dietetics (now named the Department of Clinical Nutrition) and served as its Chairman from 1985-1986. She received her Ph.D. in Nutritional Sciences from the University of Texas at Austin.
Jo Ann Carson in her office at the School of Health Professions, 1981
Junior Class in the program of Nutrition and Dietetics, circa 1976
The Dean of UT Southwestern Medical School Records:
The Archives is currently embarking on processing the presidential records of UT Southwestern’s first president Charles S. Sprague (1972-1986). When the project began, it was assumed that the records were only related to the administration of Sprague. However, records created during the administration of previous Deans of UT Southwestern were found hidden within the Sprague records. Records from the tenures of Tinsley R. Harrison (1944-1946) and Atticus J. Gill (1954-1967), both Deans of the Medical School before the Office of the President was created, were discovered. A few of the highlights that have been uncovered so far include documents related to the university’s early relationship with the military; UT Southwestern’s relationship with the Dallas medical community and Southwestern Medical Foundation; and the growth and development of the medical school.
Rules for the selection of the 1947 medical school class, circa 1946
Damage from a fire in the Clinical Sciences Building, circa 1963
The Faculty Women’s Club Records:
The records of the Faculty Women’s Club (formerly the Faculty Wives Club) document the history of the organization and its affiliation with UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. The organization was founded in 1943 by wives of full-time faculty at UT Southwestern. The purpose of the group was to welcome newcomers to UT Southwestern and to promote fellowship among the campus community through events and programs. The collection largely consists of 5 linear feet of scrapbooks, photographs, newspaper clippings, newsletters, meeting minutes, and directories created by the organization during its 76 years of existence. The records display the activities of the Faculty Women’s Club which included providing scholarship money for UT Southwestern students, hosting events for patients at Parkland Hospital, and planning social gatherings for the UT Southwestern’s faculty and students.
Faculty Wives Club picnic for patients at Old Parkland/Woodlawn Hospital, 1963
Faculty Wives Club directory, 1975-1976
The UT Southwestern Archives is open to the UT Southwestern community and external researchers. We are available, by appointment only, Monday – Friday from 9 am to 5 pm. Please email archives@utsouthwestern.edu for questions or to make an appointment to view any of our collections.
The UT Southwestern Library will host Pictures of Nursing: The Zwerdling Postcard Collection, a traveling exhibit from the National Library of Medicine, from November 19, 2018, through January 5, 2019.
The exhibition explores a unique archive of 2,588 postcards and more than 100 years of images of nurses and the nursing profession from around the world, investigating the hold these images exert on the public imagination then and now.
The postcard is a fleeting and widespread art form influenced by popular ideas about social and cultural life in addition to fashions in visual style. Nurses and nursing have been the frequent subjects of postcards for over 100 years. In fact, no other art form has illustrated the nursing profession so profusely using such a variety of artistic styles and images.
These images of nurses and nursing are informed by cultural values; ideas about women, men, and work; and attitudes toward class, race, and national differences. By documenting the relationship of nursing to significant forces in 20th-century life, such as war and disease, these postcards reveal how nursing was seen during those times.
The six-banner traveling exhibition highlights only a small selection from the 2,588 postcards of The Zwerdling Postcard Collection. Visit the U.S. National Library of Medicine website to view over 500 more postcards in the exhibition’s online digital gallery at Pictures of Nursing: The Zwerdling Postcard Collection.
This exhibit explores military connections, changes in medical education, and selected departmental highlights and institutional developments during the first two decades of the medical school. Some of the materials on display include:
A patient logbook from the 19th century
The first yearbook from the medical school
A kymograph
Lantern slides
Edward H. Cary, M.D. (1872-1953), more than any other single person, was responsible for the founding of what is today UT Southwestern. He was the originator and first president of Southwestern Medical Foundation, originally founded to strengthen Baylor Medical College. When Baylor Medical College moved to Houston in 1943, Dr. Cary and the Foundation started Southwestern Medical College, now UT Southwestern. As president of the Foundation, Dr. Cary helped negotiate the medical school’s entry into the University of Texas system in 1949. This exhibit includes his log book from his training at Bellevue Hospital Medical College.
Southwestern Medical College faculty and students, most in military uniforms, circa 1944
Both the Army Specialized Training Unit and the Navy V-12 Unit were part of the earliest years of Southwestern Medical College. These two programs, created during World War II, were intended to boost both the number of technically trained personnel and officers. The commemorative plaque given to the school in recognition of the Navy V-12 Unit is featured in this exhibit, along with early images and the first medical school yearbook.
Seal of Southwestern Medical College
One of the departments of instruction when Southwestern Medical College opened in 1943 was Medical Art and Visual Education. Southwestern Medical College was the first educational institution to offer the Master of Medical Arts degree. An original drawing by Lewis Waters, a 1950s illustrated scholarly work on polio, the seal of Southwestern Medical College, and early lantern slides help reveal how the use of images in medical education has changed over time.
The exhibit is available for viewing on the 5th floor (Business & Technology) of the J. Erik Jonsson Central Library in downtown Dallas until August 31, 2018.
The UT Southwestern Health Sciences Digital Library & Learning Center is hosting Fire and Freedom: Food and Enslavement in Early America, a new six-panel traveling exhibition. Meals can tell us how power is exchanged between and among different peoples, races, genders, and classes. The 18th century collection materials—upon which the exhibition is based—describe connections between food, botany, health, and housekeeping.
The National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health developed and produced this exhibition. Research assistance was provided by staff at The Washington Library at George Washington’s Mount Vernon. It was guest curated by Psyche Williams-Forson, Ph.D., Associate Professor and Chair, American Studies, University of Maryland College Park.
A wide group of online resources was recently purchased by the University of Texas Digital Library with Academic Library Collection Enhancement Program (ALCEP) funds. The UT Board of Regents allocates ALCEP funds for one-time collection purchases to broaden the research and scholarly capabilities of the System’s fourteen institutions. The UT Southwestern Health Sciences Digital Library and Learning Center now offers online access to two history-centric resources through an ALCEP purchase: Texas County Histories and African American Historical Serials.
The Library now has perpetual access rights to Texas County Histories, a collection of more than 80 ebooks within Accessible Archives. Accessible Archives is a full-text, searchable database that includes serial publications such as newspapers and magazines, as well as books and county histories. Note: Other content within the Accessible Archives database is only available through September 2018.
Some of these ebooks also provide information on the history of medicine in Texas. The Encyclopedia of Texas, written in the 1920s, has a chapter on the history of the Texas medical profession, written by R. W. Knox, M.D., who had been a president of what is now known as the Texas Medical Association. Another chapter highlights Dallas as the medical center of the Southwest.
The other history-related resource of interest is African American Historical Serials, which is available through EBSCO. Developed in conjunction with the American Theological Library Association (ATLA) as an effort to preserve endangered serials related to African American religious life and culture, this database is a centralized and accessible digital resource of formerly fragmentary, widely-dispersed, and endangered materials originating from various institutions and sources, including some that had not previously participated in preservation projects. This collection documents the history of African American life and religious organizations from materials published between 1816 through 1922.
Some of the online materials within this resource that chronicle the history of medicine include the Report of the State Hospital at Goldsboro, North Carolina, which covers every other year between 1902 to 1916, and the Annual Report of the Lincoln Hospital & Home, which covers some of the years between 1915 and 1922. These reports provide images of hospital buildings, department staffing, statistics on patient stays, local medical advertisements, and more.
The UT Southwestern Health Sciences Digital Library and Learning Center’s Special Collections and Archives includes more than 200 medical artifacts. Thanks to the Dallas Public Library, selected highlights from the medical artifact collection are on now display at the J. Erik Jonsson Central Library in downtown Dallas.
Some of the artifacts on display include:
An English homeopathic medicine case (circa 1873)
Pocket surgical kit with a paper packet of surgical needles, manufactured around 1880
Surgical instruments catalog published in1890
Snake bite kit similar to those issued to oil field workers in Texas in the 1930s and 1940s
A snake bite kit similar to those issued to oil field workers in Texas in the 1930s and 1940s
Some selected artifacts also have connections to the Texas Physicians Historical Biographical Database. This publicly-accessible database contains brief biographical entries and citations for more than 10,000 Texas physicians who either practiced in or had strong historical connections to Texas. Artifacts from physicians William Benjamin Goodner and Luis Leib are included in this exhibit.
A small selection of patent medicines and pharmaceutical containers
A small selection of patent medicines and pharmaceutical containers are also on display. The federal 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act called many of these earlier medicines into question. To learn more, the National Library of Medicine provides online access to the FDA Notices of Judgement Collection, which contains a fascinating digital archive of evidence files, including correspondence, legal records, lab reports, product labeling, photographs, and more.
St. Paul Hospital on Bryan Street, two nurses adjusting empty orthopedics patient bed. http://utswlibrary.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p13044coll6/id/601
One of the four display cases contains a range of artifacts, such as the pitcher (visible in this circa 1955 photo) that are also part of the extensive St. Paul Hospital Collection, 1896-2004.
The exhibit is available for viewing on the fifth floor (Business & Technology) of the J. Erik Jonsson Central Library in downtown Dallas until mid-February 2018.
It is an incontrovertible truth that excellent records management contributes greatly to excellent archives management, at least where government, institutional, and corporate records are concerned (perhaps not so much with the personal records of people that are donated to an archives). Having an established classification scheme is key to locating and retrieving records in an expeditious manner. In Managing Records: A Handbook of Principles and Practices, Elizabeth Shepherd and Geoffrey Yeo point out that classification schemes should be based on an analysis of the functions, processes, and activities of an organization. The classification scheme should not be organized by the various business units composing an organization, as similar activities and functions may occur in many of the offices/departments/centers. Thus, in order to get a complete picture of the activities of an organization, Shepherd and Yeo write, “the systems used to manage the records of those activities should reflect an organization-wide perspective.”[1] This information is incredibly relevant to the creation of records here at UT Southwestern, as many offices, departments, and centers across campus may be creating the same types of records. As a records management coordinator for an office/department/center on campus, you may wonder “How do I classify these records?” Referencing UT Southwestern’s records retention schedule can be helpful in bringing a defined order to your office records.
Our records retention schedule is divided into various categories: administrative files, personnel records, fiscal records, etc. Within these categories is a breakdown of the different “records series” which are relevant to a particular category/sub-category. One records series which should be familiar to many faculty and staff here is the “Administrative Correspondence” records series. We all create administrative correspondence throughout the course of our workday. For example, have you sent an email recently providing your thoughts and ideas on a project your department is working on? Have you distributed an inter-office memo that explains a new policy or procedure? That’s administrative correspondence! According to our records retention schedule, administrative correspondence is maintained for four years from the record’s creation. Upon reaching its four-year mark, the administrative correspondence is then destroyed. However, there is an exception to this retention rule, as explained in the schedule. The administrative correspondence of the Office of the President, senior and vice presidents, the Provost’s Office, Legal Counsel, Internal Audit, and other upper Executive Staff members falls under archival review.
What does “archival review” mean? Archival review is the requirement that the UT Southwestern institutional archivist assess the records of the above designated offices/administrative positions to determine if there are any records of long-term historical value. For example, any correspondence related to the planning of Clements University Hospital is of incredible value to our institution’s history and would be selected for the UT Southwestern Archives.
Smart records management ensures that an institution’s history will be well preserved. UT Southwestern’s records retention schedule does an excellent job of noting which records are permanent and thus should be transferred to the Archives. The schedule also clearly defines those records series
[1] Shepherd, Elizabeth and Geoffrey Yeo. Managing Records: A Handbook of Principles and Practices (London: Facet Publishing, 2002) 74.
