On retirement and a job well done

One of the Archives staff is retiring.

Tom Gaskins has been part of the Museum staff since 2004, but he was a mainstay of AFIP for years longer than that. He's been with the Institute for seventeen years, joining us from the Federal Records Center in Suitland. Tom singlehandedly ran the fifty-year old Medical Illustration Service Library of 3,000 boxes of hundreds of thousands of photographs. The library was the Department of Defense's official medical photograph repository from 1949 on. He inherited all of the responsibility for the Library as staff left and weren't replaced.

Tom's sense of duty and responsibility preserved the Library, through at least two moves, and in spite of disinterest or worse on the part of some. As well as safeguarding the material, Tom kept it being used. A photo request given to Tom was done quickly and well.

Tom joined us due to the Information Manufacturing Corporation scanning project. The initial plan was to do a lo-res scan of the Library and then discard the originals. Fortunately we were able to work around that and add the collection to the Museum. There's overseas photos from World War II, extinct diseases, and Vietnam helicopter dustoffs being found and scanned. Sometime soon we hope to show thousands of pictures online - at the moment you can see a few hundred at our Flickr links.

Tom's been an integral part of making possible hundreds of thousands of scans - 350,000 this year alone. His knowledge of the collection and willingness to share it has been the only thing that's enabled us to make sense of the staggering amount of pictures. Without Tom, the project wouldn't have gotten off the ground. He's also done work in the Archives, such as scanning all of our Civil War photographs.

While I have hopes of filling Tom's position, we certainly won't be able to replace him.