A Healthy Heritage: Collecting for the Future of Medical History

It is estimated that 80-90 per cent of all the scientists that there have ever been are alive and working today. These scientists produce a huge volume of published work in an ever-increasing number of scientific journals - 2 million articles a year are thought to be published in the biomedical science field alone and this excludes, for example, biomedical information on the web.

How will this record of biomedical activity, whether printed or electronic, be preserved for the medical historians of tomorrow? If it is impossible to collect and archive everything, what should be preserved and what should be discarded? Where and how should all the material be kept? These were some of the questions tackled in a symposium, 'A Healthy Heritage: Collecting for the future of medical history', held at the Wellcome Trust in February 1999. Among the conclusions, it was agreed that a coordinated and collaborative collecting policy is needed to ensure that a representative record of biomedical activity is kept.

Download the full symposium proceedings [PDF 300KB].

Symposium programme

Welcome and opening of the symposium
Michael Dexter, Director of the Wellcome Trust

Introduction
David Pearson, Librarian, Wellcome Library

Part I: The contemporary record of medicine
Chairman: Peter Fox, Librarian, University of Cambridge

• 'The present and future of the printed medical literature'
  Bruce Madge, Head of the Healthcare Information Service, British Library
• 'The archival record of medical activity'
  Julia Sheppard, Head of the Contemporary Medical Archives Centre, Wellcome Library
• 'The changing truth: capturing electronic medical knowledge'
  Jeremy Wyatt, Director of the Health Knowledge Management Programme at the School of Public Policy, University College London
• 'The image of medicine'
  Dr Kelly Loughlin, Health Promotion Research Unit, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Part II: What should we keep and how can we save it?
Chairman: Iain Boyle, Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh

• 'Why keep it all? Throw it in the dustbin of history'
  Tilli Tansey, Medical Historian, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine
• 'Why keep it all? The clinician's point of view'
  Tom Treasure, Professor of Cardiothoracic Surgery, St George's Hospital
• 'The challenge of preservation'
  Helen Shenton, Deputy Director of Preservation, British Library

Part III: Who will keep it?
Chairman: Michael Crump, Director of Reader Services and Collection Development, British Library

• 'The collection and retention policies of medical libraries today'
  Iain Milne, Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh
• 'Mapping the future of research libraries'
  Derek Law, Director of Information Strategy, University of Strathclyde

Workshop sessions

• Oral history
• Archives and records
• Printed material
• Journals
• Images, film and video
• Electronic media
• Reporting back and panel discussion.

Close of the symposium
David Pearson, Librarian, Wellcome Library