Queen Square Archives
“As well as digitising the volumes, we had to make them accessible”
UCL’s Queen Square Archives hold a fascinating collection of some 1,500 medical case notes dating from 1863 to 1946.
This was another interesting project to work on: as well as digitising the volumes, we had to think of a way to make the handwritten contents accessible.
To do so, we worked with the Archives team to create a naming convention that would enable searchability. The individual case notes within the main volumes were extracted and converted to multi-page PDFs, as well as standard uncompressed TIFFs and access JPEGs. Thus, whole volumes were digitised cover to cover with indexation, so that each PDF was searchable by the volume number, the name of the patient and the reason for them being taken ill. Names were then redacted from the images themselves to protect the identities of patients.
You can see examples by following the links below: