Unlocking the Asylum: North Wales Hospital Archive 1848-1995 (360G-Wellcome-208419_Z_17_Z)

The project aims to encourage research in the historic archive of the North Wales Hospital. The objectives are to catalogue, list and package the archive, to promote it as an important academic resource and to explain the Hospital’s history to the wider public. The hospital was the main institution in North Wales for the care of the mentally ill for almost 150 years, opening in October 1848 and closing in 1995. The completion of the project will see: An itemised catalogue of the existing accessions re-catalogued to current standards. An itemised catalogue of later accessions of administration records. The later accession of patient case files will be listed and repackaged. The collection will be assessed for conservation needs and preventive preservation measures highlighted and put in place. The collection will be assessed for potential digitisation projects/digital resources. Our target audiences are those involved in historical research, both from a higher education and a leisure perspective. The project will make the North Wales Hospital collection accessible to the wider community, providing an invaluable resource to academia whilst making the publicly available material more accessible to the non-academic general user.