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Launching our New Online Exhibition

14/06/201917/12/2015 by Northumberland Archives

Though the first part of the Stannington Sanatorium Project has drawn to a close our work with its records has not. After the cataloguing and part-digitisation of a staggering 5041 patient files and digitisation of 14,671 radiographic images we have been given a grant by the Wellcome Trust which will enable us to fully digitise the patient files and re-package them in conservation-grade materials. Through this time the patient files will still be searchable through our online catalogue (http://www.northumberlandarchives.com/catalogue/ ), and at the end of our year’s project a redacted image of each file will be available alongside its reference.

To mark the close of the project’s first phase we are pleased to announce we have put together an online exhibition to allow the records to be explored. The exhibition uses three sections to tell the story of the Sanatorium. In the first part, ‘Examining the patients’, where you can click on parts of a body to explore some examples from the patient files of how Tuberculosis affected different areas of the body and how each case would be treated. In ‘Tour Stannington’ you can click on links for different parts of the building to learn about the different rooms that comprised the Sanatorium, the stories of the staff and patients and their life in the Sanatorium. Click on ‘Gallery’ to find all of the images from the exhibition in one place – those of the buildings, staff and patients, and medical images of patients each labelled with the type of Tuberculosis the patient suffered from. We hope you enjoy looking at through the result of the hard work that went into the first phase of the project. The exhibition can be viewed here: http://northumberlandarchives.com/exhibitions/stannington/index.html

Our new project assistant and digitisation assistant are beginning their new roles, and another post will follow in the New Year. The second part of the project by its nature will have a different outlook to the first, but look out for new blog postings of how it proceeds over the coming months. If you have any enquiries regarding the Stannington Collection please contact the archives at archives@northumberland.gov.uk

News from the Archives!

21/12/202001/09/2015 by Northumberland Archives

We are pleased to announce that the Wellcome Trust have awarded a second grant to Northumberland Archives to continue the amazing work they have done through the Stannington Sanatorium Project.

The ‘Stannington: From Sanatorium to General Hospital: Opening Up Three Decades of Paediatric Care’ Project has been awarded £49,100. This money will allow us to digitise the main series of case files from the Stannington Sanatorium collection covering the period 1944-1966. These files comprise 100 linear feet of records – that’s a whopping 122,000 pieces of paper to be digitised! We will redact the key documents in each file – the patient progress notes, x-ray card and discharge sheet and append the redacted copies to the catalogue entry. The files span the life of Stannington from it being a tuberculosis sanatorium funded by the Poor Children’s Holiday Association (now Children Northeast), including the introduction of the National Health Service, (1947) to its final conversion to a general children’s hospital (1953), which it remained until its closure in 1984, opening up three decades of paediatric care.

The Stannington Sanatorium Project ran from August 2014-July 2015 and allowed the full cataloguing and part-digitisation of the records from Stannington Sanatorium. However, the digitisation element of the project was primarily focussed upon the original and microfiche radiographs that made up a sizeable portion of the collection and only the early case files up to 1943 were digitised at this stage. This grant will fund the digitisation of the remainder of the individual patient files included in the Stannington Collection and will fund full re-packaging of the original files in conservation grade materials.

Through this project we will utilise digitisation as a preservation tool thereby minimising further handling and potential damage to patient files through the creation of a digital surrogate which can be viewed electronically. In turn the project will increase accessibility to the collection via the redaction and web-mounting of the files. It will benefit members of the academic community who have shown a vast interest in the previous project and wish to access the files as a teaching resource or for their own research. This new digital content will be added to Northumberland Archives electronic catalogue where the c.20,000 images created in the first project can now be viewed.

The project will commence in November 2015 and will run for 12 months. Two new members of staff will be employed, one full time the other part time, to undertake this arduous task and they will endeavour to blog about their progress from November onwards so make sure you keep a look out for new postings!

End of the Stannington Sanatorium Project

21/12/202031/07/2015 by Stannington Sanatorium Project

The Stannington Project has been running for the past year but will be coming to an end this week. Over the course of the year we have catalogued all the patient files and the associated administrative files from the sanatorium. We now know that there are 5041 individual patient files and 14,671 corresponding radiographic images. Now that they have all been fully catalogued it is very easy for us to locate files and match them up to their associated radiographs, this is particularly important when dealing with requests from former patients who want to see their own files. The level of detail included in the listing of patient files makes it a useful resource for academic research and allows for the easy selection of relevant cases. Another major part of the project has been the digitisation of all the radiographs and early case files, which is now complete, and discussed in more detail in our previous blog post. The full catalogue and the attached images can all be viewed through the Archive’s online catalogue.

Working through the records over the past year we’ve learnt a lot about how TB affected children in the mid-20th century and some of the individual stories have been fascinating. We hope everyone’s enjoyed reading our blog posts as much as we’ve enjoyed writing them, and keep a look-out for future updates on Stannington and more posts from the WWI Project.

Thank you for reading!

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