During the most recent three day board retreat TMBAP board members met and addressed a wide range of topics.
TMBAP held its first 3-day retreat June 22 – 24th, 2018. The retreat was held in Washington, DC and began with a day at the National Library of Medicine. While some individuals had had contact with NLM, it was the first time that the TMBAP Board experienced the library first-hand.
Our hosts were Steven Greenberg, Head of Rare Books and Early Manuscripts and Rebecca Warlow, Head of Images & Archives who is responsible for the Murray Bowen collection. Dr. Greenberg gave us the history of the National Library of Medicine as the largest and the first library of its kind in the world. It is the repository for the world’s knowledge of medicine beginning in 1862 and moving to its current location in 1961.
Murray Bowen selected the NLM as the home for his intellectual legacy before his death in 1990. His archival collection is in the company of the collections of Nobel Prize winners and other luminaries of medical science as well as his NIMH cohorts, Paul McLean and John Calhoun.
Drs. Greenberg and Warlow talked about how archivists think. They talked about what is important in a collection and how an archivist thinks about organizing a collection. They defined principles that guided their acquisition of new materials into a collection. The discussion gave the Board an appreciation for the issues that a collection like the Murray Bowen collection presents for archiving.
Dr. Warlow took the Board on a tour of the library, including the cold storage 3 floors below the ground, where audiovisual materials are stored. We saw where the library was expanding their storage capacity for books using moving bookshelves. The expansive underground facility houses the work space for the processing of many collections, preserving books, prints, illustrations as well as a place for transcribing media materials. The library faces financial cutbacks requiring staff to do more with less.
In the temperature controlled Rare Book room, visible but locked to the public, Dr. Greenberg showed us some of the library’s rarest of books. He described how books are made and the challenge to keeping them preserved.
In the afternoon, members of the Board had a hands-on experience with the collection itself. Each board member filled out the library application to research the collection clarifying a research purpose. This is the same process that anyone interested in the researching the collection would do. The collection is open to researchers who will accept the privacy policy and agree to NLM redaction guidelines of personal information.
It is important for Board members to experience the process required to access the collection. What can seem overwhelming is actually possible, and board members can genuinely encourage others to access the collection.
The personal experience with the library and with the staff helps the Board to better understand the archiving process as well as to understand both the possibilities and constraints in which the National Library of Medicine operates.