The Medical Officer Harry Staunton sadly died unexpectedly at an early age (see Biography). One result of this tragedy is that little information is extant about the images in his collection, which includes an album which can be seen on the website. However, the album does contain some captions which provided markers for identifications of dates, places and people.
Furthermore, as a Medical Officer in the early 1940s in Tibet, there are few readily accessible government documents available that would enable a more detailed chronology of his time to be reconstructed. There would undoubtedly be more available in the Oriental & India Office Collections in the British Library but such detailed and time-consuming research was impossible in the present project because of the more basic resource enhancement remit that we had and the constraints on time.
The methodology employed in relation to Staunton’s collection, therefore, was largely image content led with indicators being sought that would facilitate dating of key images. Further research would be productive if these could be closely related to detailed textual studies of government archives, as stated.
Dr Mandy Sadan, Project Manager/Researcher, 2006