Harriet Wheelock / Monday 19 April 2010

Cataloguing the Saint Ultan’s Hospital Records

This week the preparatory work is all finished, and I have been able to start on some cataloguing. The first collection I’m working on is the papers of Saint Ultan’s Hospital, a relatively small collection of only six boxes. So I thought it would be a good time to give a little insight into the collection and how an archivist catalogues.

Saint Ultan’s was a hospital for infants established in central Dublin by a group of female doctors and activists who were horrified by the levels of child mortality in the city, especially as a result of the rise in infant syphilis after the First World War. When the hospital opened in May 1919 in a rundown former orphanage it had only 2 cots, but through the hard work of its founders and generous support of patrons, the hospital rapidly expanded. Saint Ultan’s closed in 1984, and its administrative records were presented to the College for safekeeping. The patient files were retained by the HSE, and the functions of Saint Ultan’s merged into the National Children’s Hospital.

Unlike in a library catalogue where each item is listed separately, archive catalogues are based on hierarchal arrangement. In an archive as well as describing each item individually you also give descriptions of groups of items and the collection as a whole, so that each item can be seen in context. Having got an idea of the type of records in the collection, in this case mainly annual reports, minute books, administrative papers and photographs, I developed a system of arrangement based on record type. I’ll then work through each group of records creating individual descriptions for each record, and then a description of the group as a whole, which will finally feed into a description of all the Saint Ultan papers.

Photographs show front cover and first page of the minute book of the committee that established Saint Ultan's Hospital