Posts
Living Pictures – Vet History Podcast
This year, RCVS Knowledge were very pleased to participate in an internship scheme organised by the Kings College London History department. MA student Abbie Latham spent a few months with us, reading and transcribing Fred Smith’s Boer War letters. She also recorded the following podcast, in which she explores aspects of the letters relating to […]
Happy 160th Birthday Fred Smith!
Today, 19th April, marks 160 years since the birth of Frederick Smith in 1857. I’m going to take this opportunity to tell you a bit more about the man, and what I like about him, after spending over a year working with his papers. Potted History of Smith Smith was born in Hull, […]
Introducing Helena!
Hi, my name is Helena and I am the new Archive and Digitisation assistant. My role, like Adele’s before me, is to assist in the digitisation and online accessibility of documents within the archive and historical book collection. I hope to one day become a fully qualified archivist so this role is a wonderful opportunity […]
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 […]
Cataloguing Fred Smith Part 3: Say what you see
After completing the listing and arranging of the Frederick Smith collection, I now move onto the nitty gritty of archive work – writing descriptions. You can see the descriptions I’ve completed so far on our newly launched archive catalogue, and I have linked to specific records on the catalogue as examples below. This […]
Cataloguing Fred Smith Part 2: Order from chaos
In my previous blog post about cataloguing Fred Smith, I had got as far as a huge database of information about all of the papers in the collection. In this post I will describe the next stage of the process – archival arrangement. An archivist’s job, when making historic material more accessible to researchers, is […]
Cataloguing Fred Smith Part 1: Asking questions
Now that over seven months have passed since I started this project – it is time for another update! Most of my time so far has involved looking closely at all of the archive material relating to Major General Sir Frederick Smith, which is the first stage of cataloguing the collection. I needed to […]
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. My name is Adele and since the […]
“A Good Deal of Spade Work” – The RCVS Archives Project
In June this year, RCVS Knowledge were thrilled to announce that the Alborada Trust had provided funding for a five year project to catalogue, preserve and digitise the Historic Collection and Archive of the Royal College. Now, five months later, it is time to update you with the progress that has been made so far! […]
Connect with Us