Big Plans for the New Year
Belated
Happy New Year readers!
The Heritage Centre has certainly hit the ground running in 2017. Over the
Christmas break the Hearn Room in 6 Kildare Street was fitted out with
shelving, to allow for the recall and rehousing of several hundred boxes of books
and pamphlets, which have been in off-site storage for the last 15 years!
The first
100 boxes were returned from off-site storage on 4th January and I
spent a happy (if dusty) few days sorting through the boxes. As the material
has been off-site for so long I had very little idea of what to expect, and it
was very exciting to open up each box and see what was inside. Having done some
preliminary sorting I started to shelve the material in the Hearn Room.
As well as
the books and pamphlets I found a small amount of archive material,
including a series of typescripts of lectures on psychiatry delivered by Dr
Conolly Norman at the Richmond Asylum between 1905 and 1907. These, and the other archive material found,
will be added to the archive catalogue.
 |
| Portrait of Dr Conolly Norman by Sarah Harrison |
The next
batch of boxes will be coming back at the beginning of February, with more to be recalled across the year. Once I have it all back on site and
roughly sorted and shelved, the will begin the much longer process
of cataloguing.
RCPI would
like to thank the Department of Arts, Heritage, Regional, Rural and Gaeltacht
Affairs for their support of this work thought their Scheme to Assist Local and
Regional Museums.