What's happening
New AHRC Project: Language of Access
The Archives have been awarded a grant from the AHRC to explore how subject vocabularies can be improved and extended to facilitate better access to research. The Archives are partnered with The Royal Institution, The Wellcome Library and the Courtauld Institute. The project will train early career researchers and PhD students from different disciplines to appraise each other's vocabularies constructively and will explore how their research outcomes can be exploited more effectively online using Linked Data technology. The project runs for a fourteen months from February 2013.
New cataloguing project
The Foyle Special Collections Library welcomed five new colleagues in January 2013: project cataloguers Emma Booth, Lavinia Griffiths and Paul Harrop and library assistants Charlotte Falconer and Liz Waeland. They are working on a cataloguing project relating to two major areas of strength in our collections:
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Material on the causes, course and consequences of the First World War
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Post-1945 international relations and world affairs
The project team has already discovered much of interest, including a number of items unrecorded elsewhere. Many items are annotated or have a noteworthy provenance, such as the Foreign Office copy of the Treaty of Versailles (1919).
Exhibition reveals drawings from the archives
Our newest online exhibition, Line and Form, highlights the variety of drawings normally secured in the College and military archives at King's College London. Drawing is not exclusive to artists and the exhibition includes vivid examples created by scientists, scholars, travellers, designers, physicians, military officers, administrators, students and ordinary individuals.
Codebreakers digitisation project launches
A major new digitisation resource has been launched by the Wellcome Trust. Codebreakers: Makers of Modern Genetics provides access to more than one million digitised images of original archives and books relating to the history of genetics and in particular to the discovery of the DNA double helix during the 1950s.
King's College Archives are one of five external partners to have contributed their collections to the project. Selections of key documents from the papers of Professor Maurice Wilkins and the Department of Biophysics at King's can be accessed though the Wellcome Library website. New content is being added regularly.
Highlights include x-ray diffraction slides of critical experiments involving DNA and correspondence between Wilkins and other DNA pioneers including Rosalind Franklin, Ray Gosling, James Watson and Frances Crick.
Consult the DNA and Social Responsibility blog for deeper insight into the project as it was developed.