The Goldman Herzl Family Practice Centre Centenary Exhibition (1912-2012)

Date: March 9, 2012

Exterior of the Herzl Hospital and Dispensary at 832 St Dominique. 1910s

Since January, I have been busy preparing a historical exhibit to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Goldman Herzl Family Practice Centre (GHFPC) with help from Antonio Lanza, my practicum student in the Archives Studies Stream from the School of Information Studies, McGill University.

Founded in 1912, the Centre, originally named as Herzl Hospital and Dispensary, is recognized as one of the pioneer Canadian institutions for preventive medicine as well as one of the first public clinics providing much-needed health care at little or no cost in Montreal. As one of the forerunners of the Jewish General Hospital (JGH), it helped pave the way for the founding of the hospital in 1934 and in 1974, it merged with the JGH and became the Herzl Family Practice Centre, offering a full range of family health services to a diverse community.

The selection for the exhibit is based on the Herzl fonds housed in the JGH Archives and materials from the administrative office of the Centre, the Canadian Jewish Congress Charities Committee National Archives (CJCCC National Archives) as well as the Jewish Public Library Archives (JPL-A).  The exhibit will showcase some rarely seen textual materials such as the report of the first annual meeting 1913, the expenditure report 1920, and medical records of the 1940s and 50s from the Centre’s Pediatric Clinic during and after the World War II, just to name a few. A book dedicated to the Centre’s history entitled “Our History of Family Medicine” by Michael Regenstreif originally published in 1994 will also be digitally available for the first time to the public. Et bien sûr, photographs that depict some milestone moments of the Centre’s evolution over the past century will also be included.

The exhibit will be available in April in two ways: a physical display located in the main lobby of the hospital, and a new page from the archives’ website (www.jgh.ca/archives) that will allow concurrent access to the full content of some materials that would otherwise be too difficult to display physically. It will be a great opportunity for the JGH Archives to bring to light the century-long history of the Centre’s dedication to family well-being and make it more accessible to the public, physically and online.

As many Montrealers are talking about the fluctuating weather of this week, the Archives is in the heat of the preparation of the exhibition. While this post is being written, exhibit captions are being translated; exhibit poster is being designed; Herzl-related records are being added into a database to make online searchable by the time of the exhibit. Spring is just around the corner. The physical and web exhibits will soon be launched. So stay tuned.

For more information about the centennial celebration of the GHFPC, visit News from the JGH .

Tremendous thanks to Dr. Michael Malus, Chief of the GHFPC, Geneviève Grenier, Assistant to Chief, Janice Rosen, Director of the CJCCC National Archives, and Shannon Hodge, Archivist at the JPL-A, for their generous archival contribution to enrich the collection and make possible my intention to provide the public with a more complete picture of the Centre’s 100 years of history.

Linda Lei
Archivist | Librarian
legacy@jgh.mcgill.ca

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We need your help to identify hospital memorabilia badges!

Date: December 12, 2011

The selected badges from a recent donation to the JGH Archives. Click the image to enlarge.

This set of badges (as shown in the photo) contains most of the items from a recent donation to the Archives by the Public Affairs and Communications Department. Badges are usually issued to mark special occasions. They are humble and sentimental pieces of history. The badges featured in the picture were issued to coincide or promote the launch of various past events or campaigns at the JGH and they each carry important message that the hospital wanted or helped to deliver to its community. Before their meaning gets lost over time, we hope to identify, with your help, the occasions for which they were issued or awarded and produce articles along the way. Please contact the Archives at extension 3277 or post a comment here to help us unfold the stories behind these fun collectibles so that the pieces of JGH history that they signify can become known to an even wider audience.

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Get your “Shared Drive” organized before it grows too big to handle!

Date: October 17, 2011

The Health Sciences Library librarians and archivists provide various reference services and collaborate on an interdisciplinary level with Hospital staff and students to meet their information and research needs, while also providing health information for both out-patients and in-patients. This high level of activity generates a substantial amount of records on a daily basis in varied formats and on diverse topics. After several recurrences of space shortage on the S drive, the Library team unanimously agreed to embark on a pilot project this past August, with the objective of freeing up more space and speeding up the process of locating documents. It was decided that only the most current and relevant records should be maintained, and a uniform naming guide for items on the S drive would be developed.

Shiri and I took the lead role in this initiative. We interviewed our fellow librarians in order to better understand their business activities and needs, and provided suggestions on how to deal with the record life-cycle: active, inactive, transfer to the Archives or destruction. Unnecessary duplicates, empty folders, and obsolete documents were identified and disposed of. Decade-old documents, such as teaching materials created in 2002, meeting minutes dating back to 2000, and proposals submitted in 2001 were transferred to the Archives. The entire library team participated in this project by reviewing records pertaining to their individual jobs and depositing documents that were no longer of use in a temporary storage folder for further assessment by the archivists. Shiri and I then acted as the final decision-makers and executors for the disposition of all the inactive records. The team was satisfied with the arrangement as well as the volume of records retained in the Library folder. We were grateful for the mutual understanding that it is a continuous team effort to maintain a good recordkeeping system.

Although the S drive has been available as a hospital-wide e-record storage since 1994, the responsibility of recordkeeping falls onto each individual user. How we organize our own records not only affects ourselves, but affects our co-workers as well. We would love to exchange ideas and knowledge gained through this pilot project.

An e-filing system assessment is now available upon request as a new extension of services provided by the JGH Archives. For more information, please contact me at 3277 or Shiri Alon at 2453 or via Lotus Notes.

Da (Linda) Lei
Archivist| Librarian
legacy@jgh.mcgill.ca

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Meeting of the minds

Date: October 17, 2011

In early August we had an informal visit from Nicholas Richbell, the Collections Registrar and Archivist at the Montreal University Health Center (MUHC). It was a real pleasure to have received an email from Nicholas asking if he could pay us a visit to get a sense of how we have been arranging and promoting the JGH Archives. The three of us engaged in a colorful discussion on the nature of hospital archives, the challenges of being part of a small part-time staff and how we promote ourselves within a large institution whose primary concern is patient care. The aspect of the conversation that dealt with promotion seemed to have resonated most with Linda and myself. The question of how to encourage departments in the Hospital to donate their inactive records to the Archives is a challenge that has been eluding us.

The JGH is a 637-bed hospital with 645 attending doctors and more than 40 medical and surgical specialties. There must surely be a treasure trove of archives available in each office, in every department. In the past we have sent memos through internal mail to each department announcing “We Want Your Archives”. However this only resulted in mainly fielding calls from departments wondering what should be done with their patient files (see blog post “Hospital archivists find each other at ACA 2011, September 9, 2011″. In a second attempt more detailed flyers were created, with an e-version put up on our website, as well as a shortened version published in Pulse, a JGH publication. A third attempt this past September specifically targetted all department heads and their assistants with flyers detailing the mandate of the Archives as well as our services. While we wait for feedback, we will be sending email follow-ups to this mass mailing.

Pulse Spring 2011 p.15

Help preserve a collective memory of the JGH for generations to come (Pulse, Spring 2011 p.15)

The Archives is calling for historical records related to the JGH, its departments and personnel

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nicholas and his colleague have a very interesting notion on how to generate interest in historical archives within the hospital. They will be looking into, hopefully in spring 2012,  setting up a table in some (maybe all?!) of the hospitals that make up the MUHC (Montreal Children’s, Montreal General, Royal Victoria, and Montreal Neurological hospitals, as well as the Montreal Chest Institute) and  encouraging staff to bring objects (e.g. old medical instruments)  that may be collecting dust in their offices. Nicholas and Karine Raynor, the Planning, Programming and Research Officer, will offer appraisal services and explain what the significance to the MUHC the objects may hold.  They will also take the opportunity to document the items. Think “Antiques Roadshow”. But the key to the success of this exercise, is that they will be accompanied by a doctor that will have given his/her support and endorsement for the project.

The important element in setting up such a campaign is allying the Archives with a doctor or someone in the hospital administration that understands the importance of such a project. Such an alliance is crucial within a hospital environment in order to demonstrate that the Archives is not operating within a vacuum. It functions to promote and preserve institutional memory, as well as collaborates on an interdisciplinary level in order to acquire materials and to share preservation strategies with the hospital community. This idea has inspired us tremendously in our approach to acquisitions and I look forward to hearing Nicholas’s feedback from the event, unless we find ourselves able to do it before next spring. To be continued …

Acquisitions | , , , , | 1 Comment

Hospital archivists find each other at ACA 2011

Date: September 9, 2011

Linda and I attended the Association of Canadian Archivists (ACA) Annual Conference in Toronto this past June to present at the poster session. Our poster, titled “Demystifying the Hospital Archive: Discovering the Collection at the Jewish General Hospital Archive” elaborates on an issue that confounds most people– the differences between an historical archive and a medical records department, of course within the context of a hospital. The historical archive, in our case the JGH Archives, collects materials related to the institutional memory of the Hospital, whereas the medical records department deals primarily with the maintenance and discretionary dissemination of patient records. These are contrasts that other hospital archivists in attendance (yes, there are others!) appreciated and recognized. The question is how to get the public and the rest of the Hospital community to appreciate these differences as well…

There was also much discussion among the other hospital archivists in attendance  regarding the challenges of running an archive within a larger institution whose main priority is patient care. The aspects of archives that concern archivists– the collection, preservation, digitization– may not be entirely evident to the rest of hospital staff– but the work we do benefits the entire hospital community. By ensuring that materials of historical importance and of evidential value of the daily business activities of the hospital do not get lost or destroyed,  the hospital archives digitizes and selectively makes these materials available online for public education, research and perusal.

It seems that all across Canada hospital archivists are championing the same causes in order to make sure that our roles as preservers of history and advocates of cultural heritage and legacy are understood and supported by higher level administration.

Shiri Alon
Archivist| Librarian
legacy@jgh.mcgill.ca

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JGH Libraries Open House a great success!

Date: August 8, 2011

The JGH Libraries Spring Open House this past May, was an excellent opportunity for the Archives to showcase some great aspects of its collection. From photographs, to artifacts and textual records, the Archives filled display cases with fascinating treasures from the JGH’s past.

Hmm... that's a good question. Suzanne O'Brien participates in the quiz.

The Archives also prepared a historical photo quiz that saw enthusiastic participation from staff in various departments. The highlight of the quiz event was discovering new aspects about the history of the Hospital and learning what fellow staff members know about the JGH. Great prizes were won for the most correct answers!

To try the quiz out for yourself, click here.

Can Mona Rutenberg and Joanna Bailey answer all eight questions correctly?

The Archives is currently exhibiting nursing memorabilia, historic and contemporary photographs of staff, departments and the Hospital building in the main lobby at the Côte-Sainte-Catherine entrance. As well, the Health Sciences Library is featuring a photographic display on the JGH Dietetics Department, entitled Keeping it Kosher, which came to fruition with the help of Norma Ishayek, Head of the Dietetics Department. The display features photographs from the Archives and Ms. Ishayek’s personal collection.

Some of photographs that were on display during the Open House are now online.

For more information on the JGH Archives, please visit jgh.ca/archives .

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