Following extensive redevelopment, the Library and Archive of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow was officially opened on March 19^th 2004. The redevelopment has resulted in a new air-conditioned and humidity-controlled storage room which provides easy access for staff to the rare book and archive collections. For the first time all the archives are stored together in one place. There is also a separate instrument store for the College's collection of medical instruments.

The Library Reading Room has an area for the increasingly popular Library Conversations meetings on Wednesday mornings, a computer suite for those wishing access to the internet and the library and archive catalogues and a search room area where readers can consult archives and rare books under supervision. Use has already been made of the computers for training sessions on the internet, teaching being conducted by the Library Staff. There is also an area for those who wish to come and sit in comfortable chairs to read the newspaper or medical journals.

The redevelopment also provided the opportunity to purchase a museum cabinet for displaying The Birds of North America by J.J. Audubon in the main Library Reading Room so that all visitors to the library have an opportunity of seeing this beautiful work.

The Libary Reading Room is open on weekdays from 9.00 a.m. until 5.00 p.m. The library book catalogue and descriptions of the archive collections are available on the College website at http://www.rcpsg.ac.uk.

 The instrument collection held at the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow has recently been converted onto the museum and archive documentation system CALM. Eventually it is hoped that the catalogue records will be published on the World Wide Web to increase knowledge of and access to the collections. More and more museums are now providing online catalogues of their collections. A good example is the Dental Museum at the School of Dental Science at the University of Melbourne. Much of the material in the collection was collected and catalogued by Professor H.F. Atkinson, a former Dean of the Faculty of Dental Science, who introduced the display of historical items for teaching and research in dentistry at the University of Melbourne. The dental collection covers a wide range of items from dental chairs to teaching equipment and some of the items are illustrated on the web pages. The catalogue also includes a useful bibliography. The home page of the museum can be found at http://museum.dent.unimelb.edu.au/dental/home.html. As a consequence of his work in cataloguing, preparation for exhibition and studying some of the early instruments in the collection, Professor Atkinson published a paper in the Australian Dental Journal 2002;47:(2) entitled "Some early dental extraction instruments including the pelican, bird or axe?" This can also be found online at http://www.ada.org.au/_Journal_Archives.asp.

* Carol Parry BA, DAA, Archivist, Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow: e-mail carol.parry@rcpsg.ac.uk.

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