Archives

San Francisco General Hospital has a rich history. Pieces of it come to light every day as the heavy equipment unearths remnants of old foundations, water systems, ceramic tiles, walkways, etc. in preparation for the construction of a new building. It's a veritable archaeological dig out there.

Perhaps inspired by all the rebuild activity, a few of us have started talking about organizing some type of hospital archives. In offices and labs all over campus there are stashes of historic photos, art work, old lab notebooks, scrapbooks, and file folders containing newspaper clippings and other memorabilia that will be lost unless we take steps to collect and preserve them now.

Our unofficial archives committee is working on a plan to archive this material in some yet-to-be-determined format. Maybe it will be a presentation scrapbook to be used for fund raising, maybe it will be a digital archive accessible online for all to see. Maybe it will include materials we haven't yet identified as important, and maybe it will be organized in a way we haven't even thought of yet. It's definitely a work in progress, and will probably always will be...because that's the nature of an archive.