Anniversary Celebrations, Fond Farewells, and New Beginnings.
2024 was a big year for EMBL. We celebrated our 50th anniversary, as well as the 25th anniversary of the Monterotondo site and the 30th anniversary of the EMBL-EBI site. There are milestones yet to come, with the 50th anniversaries of the Grenoble and Hamburg sites taking place this year. Additionally, there have been some big changes at the EMBL Archive…
During 2024 the EMBL archive engaged in a variety of activities to support the 50th anniversary celebrations. We collaborated with the EMBL Imaging Centre to produce an exhibition exploring the foundation and early years of EMBL. This exhibition included pictures from the EMBL signing ceremony (see below), a map of Heidelberg which included the site proposed by the EMBO Laboratory Committee, and a replica Nobel Prize medal donated by Nobel Laureate Jacques Dubochet in gratitude for EMBL’s contributions to his career.
Additionally, we worked with the EMBL Communications department, providing archival materials to support activities such as the EMBL History webpage and the Special Anniversary Publication produced for the celebrations, and we also produced an article on the creation of EMBL for the website.
The Archive engaged in social activities, hosting a coffee morning for EMBL staff interested in learning more about the activities and purpose of the Archives and Records Management, and even writing questions for a pub quiz to celebrate the anniversary.
Most critically, we used the milestone as an opportunity to engage in a collections drive to capture core evidence of EMBL’s activities over its 50 years. Working closely with our colleagues in the Alumni department, we have secured a wealth of valuable donations, including photographs from EMBL-Grenoble going back to 1978 (see below), documents relating to the creation of EMBL-EBI, and materials donated by seminal alumnus Alasdair McDowall, whose 45 year career in the field of electron microscopy began at EMBL where he worked closely with Jacques Dubochet. We’ll be exploring all these materials in future articles in the coming months as we process and catalogue them, so watch this space!
2024 also saw big changes in the archives department. Our archival assistant Viktor Osminin, who did valuable work processing and cataloguing our collections, left the organisation, and we welcomed his successor Dylan Giraldo Rojas. Furthermore Maria Papanikolau, who had unwaveringly steered the activities of the EMBL archive as its Archives & Records Manager since 2022 and contributed enormously to its successes, departed for Belgium where she now works as an Archivist at NATO. We wish both Viktor and Maria the absolute best in their future endeavours. The EMBL archive has since hired two new Archives & Records Managers:
Miten Mistry has joined EMBL after five and a half years working at the Wellcome Collection as an archivist. Miten has a scientific background, completing an undergraduate degree in Chemistry, followed by a PhD in pre-clinical dentistry before finding his passion for archives. He started his archival journey through the Bodleian Libraries’ digital archivist traineeship, which included a postgraduate diploma in digital curation
Alexander Barrington studied classics before completing an MA in Heritage Management, and has worked in a variety of roles across heritage practice at Stonehenge, Salisbury Museum and Shaftesbury Abbey Museum before finding his place in the Archives field. Alexander has just finished a 15-month role as a project archivist at EMBO working to establish EMBO’s archives for their 60th anniversary.
We are both really excited to begin our work at EMBL, build on the work of our predecessors, and share it with you all. Here’s to the next 50 years!