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Peeping behind the curtains: a look at our Historical Collection

Curious about what we keep behind our doors? Intrigued about the beginnings of theGuide to The RCVS Collection veterinary profession? Want to know the origins of the RCVS Presidential Regalia? We cover all that and more in an exciting new publication which the Trust and the RCVS have recently produced.

The RCVS Collection: paintings, artefacts, presidential regalia, books and archives is a full colour booklet which gives readers a chance to discover more about the books and journals, archival material and portraits and paintings that form the Historical Collection of the RCVS.

This important Collection can be found on the walls of Belgravia House, on display in the library and even hidden behind the curtains in the cupboards in the Members Room.

Copies of The RCVS Collection can be purchased from our online shop or by contacting Beccy on 020 7202 0721 or r.fellows@rcvstrust.org.uk price £5 plus p&p.

Want to find out more about the Collection or see the items themselves?  Contact Clare on 020 7202 0710 or c.boulton@rcvstrust.org.uk.

Celebrating National Pet Month – a selection of open access resources on small animal medicine

dogandcat2_220widthThis year National Pet Month runs from 1 April- 6 May.  As their web site says they are on a mission to:

  • help promote responsible pet ownership across the UK
  • highlight the important work of pet care professionals and working companion animals
  • raise money for the nation’s pet care charities

As a library we have a role to play in supporting the work of pet care professionals and in particular vets.  As can be expected there is a huge range of resources available on small animals so in honour of National Pet Month we thought we would highlight a few of the open access (free) ones.

Journals:
Acta veterinaria Scandinavia
Banfield Journal: Achieving Success in Practice which has a critically appraised topic in every issue!
Emerging Infectious Diseases
Journal of animal welfare law

For more open access veterinary journals

dogandcat_220widthReview articles:
Yeates, J., Everitt, S., Innes, J. F. and Day, M. J. (2013) Ethical and evidential considerations on the use of novel therapies in veterinary practice. Journal of Small Animal Practice, 54(3), pp. 119-123 This article reviews the ethical and evidential considerations of novel veterinary therapies while safeguarding the welfare of animals.
AVMA Guidelines for the Euthanasia of Animals: 2013 Edition

Books:
DeBusk, S., Silberstein, N. And O’Keefe, L. (eds.) (2011) Anesthesia for the vet practitioner. Rev. 3rd ed. [online] Portland : Banfield Pet Hospital. Available from http://www.banfield.com/Pet-Owners/About-Us/Medicine/Research/Anesthesia-Book [Accessed 18 April 2013]

dogs-220width_jpgDatabases:
PubMed Central – access to journals in biomedical, life-sciences and veterinary science
AVMA collections – a selection of articles from AVMA scientific journals that have the most practical application on specific subject areas e.g. Canine behaviour series, Disaster preparedness and response (including health of search and rescue dogs), Feral cats, Heartworm disease, Obesity in dogs, Rabies, Spay-neuter

For more open access databases

Trillium_Poncho_cat_dogConferences:
The International Veterinary Information Service (IVIS) provides free access to veterinarians, veterinary students, technicians and animal health professionals worldwide e.g.

American Association of Feline Practitioners Practice Guidelines (1998-)
European Association of Veterinary Diagnostic Imaging (2005-)
European Veterinary Conference (2007-)
European Society of Veterinary Orthopaedics and Traumatology(1998-)
North American Veterinary Conference (2005-)
World Small Animal Veterinary Association (2005-)

All you need to do is register with the website.

So as you can see there is a lot of information out there. Don’t forget if you need help finding your way through it all we are here to help.

First image by Claudio Matsuoka under this Creative Commons License
Second image by Carterse under this Creative Commons License
Third image by MarilynJane under this Creative Commons License
Fourth image by Ohnoitsjamie under this Creative Commons License

RCVS Archives Project: Next steps

As you will have gathered from the previous blog by our Archivist Lorna, the Archives Project here at RCVS Knowledge is well under way. Whilst Lorna is currently getting to grips with the collections (and Fred Smith’s handwriting) I have been recruited to work on the digital side of things.

IMG_1607a

My name is Adele and since the beginning of January I’ve been working on the project as Archive and Digitisation Assistant. My role is to carry out the digitisation of priority documents within the archive and historical book collection, this includes preparing the material with preservation and repackaging measures, creating the high resolution digital images, writing descriptions and relevant metadata for the scans and uploading them onto an online digital archive. Around this I will also be assisting Lorna with promotion of the project through social media, displays and outreach activities such as talks. Once awareness of our collections grows and the enquiries come flying in I look forward delving into the collections to answer some of these too.

Previously I’ve worked as Archive Trainee at Rambert Dance Company and as the Archive and Special Collections Assistant at University of the Arts, London. Though I’ve worked with digital images within archive collections before- as well as taking on ad hoc digitisation- this project is on a whole new scale for me. I’m so excited to get our online digital archive up and running, it’s great to work in a project with such defined goals and to join at this early stage allowing me to be part of the decision making process. There are certainly many decisions to be made!

The first aspect of my role I looked into was the scanning itself. The library had already purchased a professional high resolution scanner so I was able to get straight on with comparing different settings. We want these scans to be of high quality and available in years to come so we chose to scan into TIFF format as this is uncompressed; it means it is excellent quality and 100% of the data captured during scanning is retained. For our printed text based images we want to our users to be able to search the text within them, from a TIFF file we are able to create a PDF document that we can perform optical character recognition on in order for this to be possible. We were also concerned with how easy it would be to read our images on a screen. After some in house-testing, it was decided that scanning images in greyscale provided more contrast. As the real value in our historical books and journals is the information within them, we made a decision to scan this type of material in greyscale. For images and archive material we will likely be scanning in colour to better represent the unique material context of these documents.

Veterinarian greyscale 75

The Veterinarian scanned in greyscale. Easy to read and a much more efficient file size to store.

Smith letter colour 75

Letter to Frederick Smith. If this were scanned in greyscale would we see that the annotations were made at separate times?

[Edit: These images have been compressed and resized, and do not reflect the quality of the images to be displayed in the digital archive.]

Of course once I had decided how I was going to scan the material, I needed to know what to scan. A priority list has been made by Clare our Head of Library and Information Services in agreement with our funders The Alborada Trust. This was based on demand, what is already accessible online elsewhere and predicted research value. As Lorna is currently in the process of cataloguing the first archive collection, it made the most sense for me to start with our historical book and journal collection and so I am currently working on scanning volumes of The Veterinarian. The Veterinarian, published from 1828 to 1902, was one of the first veterinary journals to be launched and we hold a complete run of the periodical bound by volume. I’m currently digitising the third volume and I can see why it has been chosen as a priority- there are some really interesting case studies and comments on the profession at that time.

The Veterinarian shelves (2)

Volumes of The Veterinarian 1828-1902

Now we have some digitised pages to work with, Lorna and I are trialling some Digital Asset Management systems for the most important part of the process – making the images accessible to you online. We hope to be able to give you an update on this soon.

If you are interested in our collections then follow the hashtag #vetarchives on our twitter account @RCVSKnowledge for some updates, fun discoveries and more.

If you have any questions for the Archives Project team, please email us archives@rcvsknowledge.org

-Adele-

Digital Collections website is live!

After months of development and tweaking, I am now very happy to show the world our fantastic new Digital Collections website!

My most recent blog posts have described the cataloguing process – with the end result of the online archive catalogue. The Digital Collections site serves the other main aim of the RCVS Vet History Project – digitising our historic material and making it available for everyone to see, from anywhere in the world.

We will be adding more and more content to the site as the project continues, but over 150 works, dating from 1613 to 1912, are currently published. These include original watercolours, photographs, letters and periodicals.

The homepage of the new Digital Collections website

You can visit the live site now at http://www.rcvsvethistory.org/

If you want to know a little bit more about how we got here – this is the story so far…

When I started at RCVS Knowledge in October 2015, there already was a Digital Archive website, which displayed some of the oldest veterinary periodicals in our collections. Whilst this site was suited to the format of periodicals, I could see that it would not work for archive material, such as letters or manuscript notes.

Archive material can be challenging to share online, as you usually need more information about the items before you can understand them. For example, when reading a letter between two individuals, they may refer to each other only by first name, talk about places such as ‘the office’, or ‘the hospital’, or just write ‘Saturday’ for the date. The archivist of a collection will know which people and places are being referred to, and at least an approximate date the letter was written. If this information (or metadata) can be displayed alongside the images, then that provides some context for the researcher. Additionally, if the metadata is searchable, this will help researchers find the material more easily in the first place.

Letter to Fred Bullock from Frederick Smith, 1912 – with final paragraph written up the side

Quite a lot of archive material is also handwritten, which presents another difficulty. Not only can the writing be hard to decipher, it can be written at right angles, in different colours, and sentences can carry on over two pages. To make this as easy to read as possible, you need high resolution, colour images that you can easily rotate and zoom, and quickly navigate between.

Last year, Adele and I began a search for existing platforms that met our requirements for image display. We looked at other digital archive websites, but discovered that the choice seemed to be between complicated multi-functional software for huge organisations, or simple online galleries, better suited to photography and online stores. A third option was to build something ourselves, using open-source software, and I loved the look and functionality of the Universal Viewer tool, used by the Wellcome Library, Bodleian Library and British Library. We are on a slightly smaller scale than these institutions, but our needs were the same! So we contacted Digirati, the developers of the UV, and they worked with us to create a modification of the Viewer, and invited us to take part in the pilot of Wellcome’s Digital Library Cloud Services platform.

Screenshot of the Universal Viewer displaying a close up zoom of a manuscript letter.

The Universal Viewer also allows us to link from the images of the material to the library or archive catalogue record. I knew that I wanted users of the Digital Collections website to easily see and understand how one archive item relates to others in the collection. This is helped by linking to the archive catalogue, but we have also included a content ‘tree’ on the website, which users can expand and collapse to see what is on the whole site quickly and easily.

Underneath each Universal Viewer gallery, you can see the location of the currently displayed item within a tree of all content on the website. By expanding and collapsing the branches, you can quickly navigate to other items

As well as providing access, we wanted to encourage engagement between us and users of the site. You can share content by embedding individual Universal Viewer galleries on social media, and contribute additional knowledge and insight by suggesting your own tags.

We hope RCVS Vet History Digital Collections can become an active hub for interaction between veterinarians, historians and the general public eager to learn more about the fascinating past of the profession.

So take a look and let me know what you think! If you would like to be notified of major updates to content, please sign up to the mailing list here.