Pathology on Show
Foundation year medics at Foresterhill are taking the lead in new displays in the Pathology & Forensic Medicine cases at the Medical Library. Currently featured are exhibitions on Cervical cancer by guest curator Dr Luiza Moore, and on Tuberculosis by Dr Chikezie Nwafor (pictured). The displays will be available until March 2010.

Calcutta Connections
A short film exploring the connections between the University of Aberdeen and India, contrasting past roles of the University - training teachers, doctors, administrators and others who left Aberdeen for India - with the current strong flow of Indian students coming to Aberdeen to study.

The University’s connections with India include outstanding museum collections, amongst which is an egg collection recently found to contain the only known egg in the world of the highly endangered Jerdon’s Courser Rhinoptilus bitorquatus, from southern India.

The film was originally made to be shown in the Scottish Pavillion at the Kolkata Book Fair 2009, part of the Scottish Calcutta Connections programme.

Watch it on YouTube.

Revealing the Hidden Collections
Scottish universities hold a high proportion of Scotland’s nationally-important museum collections – in total over 1.8 million items. Over 60% of these collections are uncatalogued with information on just 7.5% available on the web and 1.8% have images. This represents an enormous barrier to use. The University of Aberdeen is leading an 18-month project with eight other universities to create collection-level descriptions for all the Scottish university museums, together with improved electronic access to item-level catalogues and images.

Scottish university museums hold 32% of the country’s materials on history of science, 31% of the nation’s coins and medals, 24% of its fine art, 20% of natural science collections and 18% of world culture, all with a disproportionately high representation of nationally, and internationally, important items, and usually associated with rich contextualising information.

We have received £240,000 from the Scottish Funding Council towards a £318,000 project to make the museum collections in Scottish universities more accessible to researchers and the wider public.

The partners in this project are the universities of

• Aberdeen
• Dundee
• Edinburgh
• Glasgow
• Glasgow School of Art
• Heriot Watt
• Robert Gordon
• St Andrews
• Stirling
  

Reuniting the Parts
The University’s seven museum collections and its Special Libraries & Archives are physically separated, but richly interconnected through 500 years of collecting.

We have been awarded £40,000 from the Museums Galleries Scotland fund for Recognised Collections towards a £53,000 project to demonstrate these connections. The grant will also support an inventory of our large Herbarium, and cataloguing of the British flowering plants, to make these collections more accessible and able to be used in the project.

Opening the collections
The University currently cares for around 300,000 historic artefacts. Its unique collections relating to medicine, natural sciences, world culture, contemporary Scottish art and scientific instruments are of importance in wider world as well as the history of the North-East.

In the past, these collections have been recorded in varying formats and to differing standards. In 2008-09, work has been underway to merge disparate electronic information about our collections into one system. This is helping us meet the growing demand for access to the wealth of information about the collections from staff, researchers, students and the wider public by enabling information to be retrieved with just one search. It will also aid museum staff in managing the collections; enhancing exhibitions and workshops, and making enquiries easier to answer.