Archive and Museum Committee
The Chairman of the Committee is Iain Hathorn. The members were Jim Moss, the Curator; Rachel Bairsto, the BDA Curator; Chris Stephens, Stuart Taylor, Chris Kettler and the BOS CEO Les Joffe. The committee has met on three occasions and involved telephone connections for distant members. Rachel Bairsto has remained available in her new part time role with the BDA.
Very sadly Jim Moss died on the 14th June after a long illness. Jim was for many, many years the custodian of the British Orthodontic Archive. He had been working away at the museum trying to catalogue all the items held at the BOS in his last few months. He will be sorely missed.
The A&M committee now needs to work at the cataloguing process started by Jim Moss. Sadly we need to gain access to papers which Jim held at home, to progress this process. His son Richard has been in contact with Les Joffe and we are hopeful that, at a suitable occasion, we can transfer his A&M related papers to the BOS HQ.
At the August meeting, Mike Mars attended to consider transferring Cleft Lip and Palate related papers to the BOS. We are in the process of looking at how to achieve this and for making suitable arrangements for gaining research access to the material.
We are at the stage of making the electronic transfer of the last four years of the BOS archive to complete 100 years of continuous records held at the Wellcome. In May we delivered papers from the BOS Board, AGM papers and the programmes from the BOC to the Wellcome on Euston Road. This means that the orthodontic societies have a continuous paper record stored at the Wellcome from 1907 till 2004. Ann Wright has compiled further electronic records from 2004 till 2008 which will be delivered to the Wellcome in October 2010. All future records will be in this electronic form.
We have made a decision to keep a secure collection of the BSSO proceedings, the BJO and the JO in our Museum. We have also bound all our annual publications year by year and the Audit publications have been bound separately, also to be stored securely. When at the Wellcome we have confirmed that there are copies of the BJO and JO held at the British Museum and available on request. There is a gap in the Proceedings of the BSSO at the Wellcome, we are hopeful of filling this gap from Jim Moss’s personal collection.
The BOS continues to collect abstracts of the current MSc and PhD orthodontic projects on a national basis. We also continue to collect records of orthodontic treatments to keep a long term electronic record of orthodontic techniques over the years. We continue to work at collecting electronic examples of cases treated by various techniques starting with the three cases treated by Harry Orton. Alan Hall has offered a number of early Begg cases which he has treated. We are working hard at gathering a collection of cases treated to high standards, representing the evolution of orthodontic treatment in the UK.
The Leighton Growth material is held at Kings – we have been in contact with Kings and are assured that the archive is appropriately stored and available to access for research purposes. A visit to Kings will take place soon to view the archive.
I will stand down as chairman of the A&M committee at the end of 2010. Stuart Taylor stepped down from the committee in November 2009, Stuart has made a huge contribution to our work over the last three years; he will also be missed. Austin Banner has joined the Committee as an energetic new member and has been proposed as the new chairman starting 2011. A further proposal has been made that there will not be a Curator in the future.
Great thanks, as always, go to Ann Wright and in particular Jaki Walker who has taken notes of our meetings over the year.
Iain Hathorn (Chairman)