Goodbye Wellcome … Hello Library

The end of December 2011 saw the completion of the 21 month Wellcome Trust funded project to electronically catalogue RCPI's entire archival holdings. The project has been a great success; all the material in the 26 archival collections held by RCPI at the start of the project has been catalogued. In addition, two collections of material which were donated to the archive during the project have all been catalogued; the papers of the Royal National Hospital for Consumption for Ireland and the archive of Apothecaries' Hall.

The online catalogue now contains over 4,500 records across 28 collections. The collection lists are all available from the archive webpage, and all the records can be searched using our online archive catalogue.

As well as providing a catalogue of the archive material held by RCPI for the first time, the project has also been very successful in raising awareness of the collections RCPI holds, and in encouraging researchers to make use of the wide variety of primary resources we hold for the history of medicine and medical education in Ireland.

Although the Wellcome Trust funded project has finished, the care of the archive is very much an ongoing process. RCPI is committed to the continued care and development of its archival collections, and continues to collect archival material to add to the collections we already hold. During 2011 the RCPI archive accessioned the minute book of the Dublin Obstetrical Visiting Society, the archive of The Apothecaries' Hall of Ireland, a copy of the Book of Saint Ultan and a collection of material relating to Sir Andrew Horne (1865-1924), the first Master of the National Maternity Hospital.

With the archival cataloguing backlog now under control, attention is moving to focus on the backlog of cataloguing in the library. The Dun's Library contains approximately 30,000 items, but at present just under 9,000 volumes are catalogued in our online library catalogue. In the run up to the 300 anniversary of the founding of the library in 2013, the Heritage Centre is going to be concentrating on cataloguing the library collections, and making them available. Hopefully this project will be as successful as the Wellcome funded archiving project, and the growth in the use of the archive over the past two years will be mirrored by an increased use in RCPI's unique library collections.