RCSI Heritage Collections

The World Digital Preservation Day theme this year is “why preserve?” This is a question many digital archivists ask themselves as they wait hours for content to upload, painstakingly attach metadata to files and spend dizzying amounts on preservation systems. I’ll be answering this question in the context of the RCSI Digital Heritage Collections and also highlighting some of the gems of our collections along the way. First, it’s important to explain what I mean by “digital preservation”. It’s a term that gets a lot of blank looks when I try to explain my job to people at parties. The official Digital Preservation Coalition definition is digital preservation “refers to all of the actions required to maintain access to digital materials beyond the limits of media failure or technological and organisational change”.  At RCSI, digital preservation involves a combination of preserving born-digital files and preserving digitised physical materials. “Born-digital” refers to digital...

 Death or Surgery: The Quest for a Painless, Waking Sleep  On October 16th, 1846, William Thomas Green Morton, a dentist, completed the first successful public demonstration of inhaled ether, relieving surgical pain at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. It is because of this first successful public demonstration of the use of an anaesthetic that each year on October 16th we celebrate the history and discovery of anaesthesia for use in surgeries. If one can imagine that before these pioneering doctors, surgeons and dentists, any kind of medical procedure and the inevitable pain that came with it meant copious amounts of alcohol, herbal mixtures containing opium alkaloids, hypnotism or pieces of leather/wood to bite down on. This was the backdrop to which Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829); Henry Hill Hickman (1800-1830); William Clarke (1819-1898); Crawford Williamson Long (1815-1878); Horace Wells (1815-1848); William Thomas Green Morton (1819-1868); John MacDonnell (1796...