April 30,
2007
Dentistry launches digital archive as a community
resource
Beth Kettell is digitizing the dentistry archives
housed in this climate controlled room in the Eastman Dental Center. The
collection is available online at
www.urmc.rochester.edu/dentistry/bibby/about/archives.cfm.
Graduate student Elizabeth Kettell has spent the
past year connecting the past to the future. A senior library assistant at
the Basil G. Bibby Library, Kettell is nearing the end of a project to
digitize the entire dentistry archive, a collection of more than 300 images
and other artifacts dating to the early 1900s.
In poring through the yearbooks and newspaper
clippings and photos, Kettell says she’s gleaned one very important
truth.
“Never, ever throw anything away,” Kettell
says. “I’m not the pack-rat type, but I have developed a new
appreciation for those people who save materials. You never know how useful
that information will be for future generations.”
When the digital archive project is complete,
researchers will be able to search the entire collection online and view
all of the images as well as other scanned materials. The effort was funded
by a grant from the Regional Bibliographic Databases and Interlibrary
Resources Sharing Program and the Rochester Regional Library Council.
Since launching the virtual project, Kettell says
there’s been a dramatic increase in the number of inquiries from
researchers. She’s received e-mails from scholars who are studying
the history of x-ray, and even received a phone call from a women who
was hoping to track down information about her grandmother who attended the
School for Dental Hygienists in the 1920s.
The collection covers the early years of the Rochester
Dental Dispensary, the School for Dental Hygienists, and the European
dental clinics—all established thanks to funding from Eastman Kodak
Company founder George Eastman. The records continue through the renaming
of the dispensary to the Eastman Dental Center in 1965 and the relocation
from East Main Street to its current home at the Medical Center in 1978.
Among the items is the original patient registry signed by George Eastman
and other visiting dignitaries from around the world during the
dispensary’s grand opening in October 1917. There’s also a 1958
telegraph from President Dwight D. Eisenhower congratulating the dispensary
on its 40th anniversary.
A special online exhibit called Birdcages and Nursery Rhyme Walls: The Children’s
Waiting Area in the Eastman Dental Clinics includes
images of the clinic lobbies in Rochester, Paris, Brussels, Stockholm, and
Rome—all of which featured live birds in oversized cages and fairy
tale murals painted on the walls to assuage the fears of children
visiting for the first time.
Kettell says she’s working now to provide
detailed caption information. Tracking down names and establishing
connections is what she calls the real joy of being a librarian. “I
love the thrill of the hunt,” she adds. Kettell is hopeful that the
successful launch of the virtual archive will encourage all those pack-rats
out there to donate related materials they may have saved over the years.
“It’s the best way to keep the history alive.”
To view and search the archive, visit
www.urmc.rochester.edu/dentistry/bibby/about/archives.cfm.
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