Current Projects

The 'Aberdeen Colleges of Education' Archive
With Northern College of Education and the University of Aberdeen merging in 2001 and the Hilton campus vacated in 2005, the archives of the teaching colleges back to 1874 were deposited with Special Libraries and Archives. This is a major institutional archive and a tremendous addition to the University’s historic collections highlighting the important history of educational training in Scotland The archives are also important to the current School of Education in establishing its long and proud history...more

The Aberdeen Medico-Chirurgical Society
A project to catalogue the papers of the Aberdeen Medico-Chirurgical Society is now underway as a result of a ‘Research Resources in Medical History’ award granted by the Wellcome Trust. The project will allow the Society’s rich and unique collection of papers to be accessed online for the first time via the University’s archive database, revealing the Society’s contribution to the provision of medical training, the championing of radical public health measures and the establishment of hospitals and their services within the local community...more

George Washington Wilson Cataloguing Project
George Washington Wilson (1823-93) was a pioneering photographer whose camera captured scenes across Britain, the Western Mediterranean, North and South Africa, as well as Australia. By the early 1880s the company he founded had become the largest and best known photographic and printing firm in the world.

The University of Aberdeen has over 40,000 glass plate negatives from the firm, 34,000 of which have been summarily catalogued and can be searched on-line. In 2006, a cataloguer was employed to create detailed descriptions of the remaining negatives and over 150 new entries are being added to the database on a weekly basis.

Research Resources in Medical History
Special Libraries and Archives has received funding from the Wellcome Trust’s ‘Research Resources in Medical History’ scheme to catalogue our extensive early medical records, which date from the 15th to 19th centuries. Cataloguing of more than 100 collections has begun and is scheduled to be completed by early 2009.