Identity area
Type of entity
Authorized form of name
Parallel form(s) of name
Standardized form(s) of name according to other rules
Other form(s) of name
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Description area
Dates of existence
History
Toni (Antonia) Bunch was born on 13 February 1937 in Croydon, Surrey, England, to Harold and Helen Bunch (née Wilson). Having missed out on going to university when she left school, she took an alternative route to qualify for her chosen profession. After completing correspondence courses and attending classes at Ealing Technical College, she sat and passed the Library Association’s Associateship (ALA) examination in 1960 and subsequently worked in Scotland, spending most of her career in Edinburgh, where she specialised in medical librarianship.
From 1962-1965, Toni was employed as Assistant Librarian at the Scottish Office in Edinburgh. In 1965, she was appointed as Librarian at the Scottish Health Service Centre, where she remained until 1981, establishing its library as a national resource centre for information on all aspects of healthcare management and planning. Whilst working full-time, she completed a research thesis entitled ‘Hospital and medical libraries in Scotland: an historical and sociological study’, which she successfully submitted for the Fellowship of the Library Association (FLA) in 1973 and later published as an article in Scottish Library Studies 3 (1975).
Toni went on to register as a part-time research student at the University of Strathclyde in 1974, graduating in 1976 with the degree of Master of Arts for her thesis entitled ‘Health care administration: an information sourcebook’. The thesis was published by Capital Planning Information in 1979.
From August 1981 until 1986, Toni was employed as a Lecturer in the Department of Librarianship (known from 1985 as the Department of Information Science) at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. She also enrolled as a part-time PhD student there in January 1982. The topic of her doctoral research was Scottish medical and scientific book collectors to the end of the eighteenth century, which she described as being a logical progression from the research undertaken for her FLA thesis in the early 1970s. In March 1987, however, she abandoned her doctoral studies without completing or submitting a thesis. That same year, she was appointed as Director of the newly created Scottish Science Library at the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, remaining in post until her retirement at the age of 59. She latterly lived in the village of Garvald, East Lothian, and died, aged 86 on 21 March 2023.
Toni was a Fellow of the Institute of Information Scientists, receiving its Jason Farradane Award in 1990; a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (a new body created when the Library Association merged with the Institute of Information Scientists in 2002); a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, and a Council member of the Scottish Society for the History of Medicine. During her career, she served on several national and international committees concerned with librarianship and information science. She was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1996.
Places
Edinburgh, Scotland
Legal status
Functions, occupations and activities
Mandates/sources of authority
Internal structures/genealogy
General context
Relationships area
Related entity
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Access points area
Subject access points
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Occupations
Control area
Authority record identifier
Institution identifier
Rules and/or conventions used
ISAAR(CPF): International Standard Archival Authority Record for Corporate Bodies, Persons and Families, International Council on Archives (2nd edition, 2003); Rules for the construction of personal, place and corporate names, National Council on Archives (1997).
Status
Level of detail
Dates of creation, revision and deletion
Created by Anne Cameron, September 2023.
Language(s)
Script(s)
Sources
- GB 249 University of Strathclyde Archives and Special Collections, OS/54/160: Register of students terminating postgraduate studies at the University of Strathclyde in 1997
- 'Antonia Janette Bunch', https://prabook.com/web/antonia_janette.bunch/3372390, accessed 28 September 2023
- 'Funeral of the late Toni Bunch, Garvald', Garvald community website https://www.garvald.org.uk/funeral-of-the-late-toni-bunch-garvald/, accessed 28 September 2023
- Herald and Times Archive, Glasgow Herald 15 June 1996 https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/12116232.scores-of-ordinary-people-share-in-the-awards-with-leading-industrialists-doctors-and-academics-scotland-gets-new-knights/, accessed 28 September 2023