Been drawing some stuff lately lol.

Killer dust: cataloguing and preserving the asbestos collections at the University of Strathclyde

Killer dust was a two year project funded by the Wellcome Trust to catalogue and preserve several remarkable occupational and environmental health archive collections at the University of Strathclyde. The collections, which document the growing awareness from the 1960s of the dangers associated with asbestos exposure, include:

the extensive archive of OEDA (the Occupational and Environmental Diseases Association) and its satellite collections

investigative journalist Laurie Flynn’s papers on the asbestos industry

the papers of Alan Dalton, safety and environmental campaigner

the sound collections of the Scottish Oral History Centre (SOHC)

Inside the OEDA deposit, we discovered some additional archives, namely

the Records of the Cancer Prevention Society, a cancer pressure group which was formed in January 1978 by health and safety consultant Ted Rushworth and asbestos critic Nancy Tait

the Papers of air conditioning maintenance worker W H Knight, who sued his former employer Land Rover Ltd for health and safety negligence

the Papers of the safety officer at the Warren Spring Laboratory, Stevenage, dating from the late 1960s. At the time new regulations on asbestos were in the making and the Laboratory was asked to look into their implications for working environments in Mintech (Ministry of Technology) establishments

Together, these collections form a unique and immensely rich corpus of material.

The Killer dust project was successfully completed in May 2017. Please contact us if you are interested in consulting any of these collections.