San Fernando Valley Chancellor’s Society Event

An Inside Look: How Special Collections Impact the Future of Medicine and Life Sciences

The UCLA Library’s rich and diverse historical collections are created, managed, and promoted by a corps of curators with subject knowledge and expertise in rare books, manuscripts, photographs, and printed ephemera. Hear from award-winning curator Russell Johnson about a world-class historical medical and life science research collection is created. See and even touch a selection of some of the rare archives available at UCLA, such as original letters by Florence Nightingale, medicinal recipe manuscripts, and baby record books.

About Russell Johnson

Russell Johnson has been a librarian at the UCLA Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library for twenty years and curator for Library Special Collections’ History of Medicine & the Sciences division since 2009. He hails from Massachusetts but landed in Los Angeles 35 years ago, first to get an MA in Physiological Psychology (now Behavioral Neuroscience), then an MLS at UCLA’s School of Library and Information Sciences. As the only librarian/archivist in the International Society for the History of the Neurosciences, he hosted two of its meetings at UCLA, including one at the end of his presidency in 2007. Under his leadership, the UCLA Library built the largest historic baby book collection in the world with nearly 1800 baby record books. In 2009 Johnson was named Librarian of the Year by the Librarians Association of the University of California-Los Angeles (LAUC-LA).