Discover stories from the Archives at NCBS
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The Almirah – In Search of Jamal Ara’s Papers
“”Birds of Bihar… Birds of Bihar…” she would keep mumbling this over and over again in her last days. I am not sure why she kept repeating the phrase. Perhaps it was a draft of a book that she was writing, or a project she wanted to undertake. I do not really know. But as…
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Reflections on OH Workflows – With special focus on Sensitivity Reviews
My first introduction to Oral Histories was in 2022, when I began summarising interviews with conservationists at the Archives at NCBS. The summary would consist of a document with archival identifiers, a biography, and an abstract featuring indexed headings with details under each. Bound by deadlines, however, we had to streamline this time-consuming process. The…
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Archiving a cytogeneticist’s material
I immensely enjoyed archiving A P Krishnaja’s material, primarily because as a Biology graduate with molecular biology research experience, sifting through her laboratory data felt like looking through a window to the past. Various laboratory methods have evolved over time to accommodate the growing needs of the researcher, but certain routines have been preserved from…
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Federico or a manifesto on the ethics of description
If I speak – If in this minute, I prise open the spines of old texts and extract the root Mirror it ten-fold to consequence and stymy it in time – have I caught history? Like one might catch a cold? Is it upon me, the malign epic, the stentorian saga? By my naming do…
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Why we changed the way we collect material in 2024
In 2023, we went on a rather energetic, and (for us) unprecedented drive to bring in exciting new material into the archives. Rather quickly into the year, we realised that the standard methods of acquisition just didn’t bring in archival material from female scientists, the way they did from male scientists. We had less of…
