Lamar Soutter Library Contributes Rare Books to Online Medical Heritage Library, August 2011
We are pleased to announce the addition of 286 classic medical rare books from the Lamar Soutter Library, University of Massachusetts Medical School, to the Medical Heritage Library (MHL)’s holdings in the Internet Archive. The Lamar Soutter Library is the first contributor of existing digital materials to the MHL; by adding the tag “medicalheritage” to the cataloging information for each book in the Internet Archive, the Lamar Soutter Library has radically expanded the volumes’ potential audience. These digital texts join materials from Columbia, Harvard, and Yale, the National Library of Medicine, and the New York Public Library that will comprise the MHL.
“These are books of lasting interest and value,” said Jack Eckert, Public Services Librarian for the Countway, a founding member of the MHL. “While few in number, the volumes digitized from the Lamar Soutter Library represent a wide variety of primary works in the history of medicine. Researchers will now be able to find and consult some early American and English titles, including works by Caspar Wistar, William Smellie, John Hunter, Sir Astley Cooper, and John Bell, as well as landmark classics in medicine, such as the 1761 edition of Morgagni’s De sedibus et causis morborum with a 1769 English translation and a 1631 edition of Spigelius’ De formato foetu–the earliest item in the Soutter collection.”
“The Soutter collection also includes a useful array of 19th century works on anatomy, therapeutics, obstetrics, hysteria, psychiatry, and neurology, including cerebral localization, from diverse American and European authors such as James Jackson, Charles D. Meigs, S. Weir Mitchell, Samuel D. Gross, F. J. Gall, Oliver Wendell Holmes, David Ferrier, Robley Dunglison, J. M. Charcot, and Emil Kraepelin. Having these works available is a great asset, and they are a wonderful enhancement to the growing corpus of literature in the MHL.”
The MHL currently provides access to more than 11,000 books and expects to increase that number to more than 30,000 in 2012. Current holdings span a broad range of topics that focus on the intersection of medicine and society. Subject areas include general public health topics, psychiatry, popular medicine, medical directories, forensic medicine, and therapeutics, as well as surgery, anatomy, and physiology.
The MHL promotes free and open access to quality historical resources in medicine. Our goal is to provide the means by which readers and scholars across a multitude of disciplines can examine the interrelated nature of medicine and society, both to inform contemporary medicine and strengthen understanding of the world in which we live. More information can be found at www.medicalheritage.org.
For more information about the Lamar Soutter Library of the University of Massachusetts Medical School and its Office of Medical History and Archives, please see http://library.umassmed.edu/index.cfm .
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New Contributors Sought; Participation Levels Announced, August 2011
The Medical Heritage Library is seeking new contributors to expand and enhance resources and services to the MHL’s community of scholars, students, and other users. To facilitate participation of libraries and other organizations, the MHL has identified three ways in which they can contribute.
MHL Participation Levels
Principal contributor: any institution that dedicates resources or staff time to achieve MHL goals and objectives. This includes the partners currently digitizing materials and also those organizations that are contributing expertise. Because grant projects are labor-intensive (far beyond grant-sponsored personnel), any participant in such a project would be considered a principal contributor. Principal contributors have a demonstrated commitment to the MHL, thus governance council members are drawn from this group; participation is co-terminus with the contribution.
Contributor: any institution that publicizes the MHL and promotes its use and development. Our goal is to obtain the participation of history of medicine special collections and other organizations in promoting the use of MHL collections. In exchange for recognizing them on the MHL website as contributors, we hope that contributors will link to the MHL, distribute MHL print materials, display a flyer, and inform us of opportunities for collaboration, such as co-sponsoring a presentation about the MHL to appropriate constituencies.
Collection contributor: any institution that adds existing digitized materials to the MHL. Such organizations will be asked to issue a press release about the content contribution, in addition to the above.
For more information, please contact: medicalheritage@gmail.com.
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Watermark, May 2011
Medical Heritage Library Progress Report
One year ago, we reported on the newly funded Medical Heritage Library, a digital curation collaborative (see: “A Digital Library for Medical Heritage,” Watermark June 2010). The MHL is digitizing 30,000 public domain books from the collections of the National Library of Medicine, New York Public Library, and the medical libraries of Columbia, Harvard, and Yale and is exploring with these and other partners how best to deliver and support use of such digitized resources. The MHL’s mission – “to provide the means by which readers and scholars across a multitude of disciplines can examine the interrelated nature of medicine and society, both to inform contemporary medicine and strengthen understanding of the world in which we live” – is user-centered and thus furthers the respective missions of partners as well as the interests of the history of medicine community.
Digital Content and Use
Over the past twelve months, the MHL has made progress on a number of fronts. As of this writing, 9,245 monographs have been uploaded to the Internet Archive (IA); nearly 5,000 more have been digitized and are awaiting processing and deposit. Subject areas include general public health topics, psychiatry, popular medicine, medical directories, forensic medicine, and therapeutics, as well as surgery, anatomy, and physiology. The ‘browse list’ of topics on the MHL’s IA homepage (http://www.archive.org/details/medicalheritagelibrary) demonstrates the breadth of the history of medicine, ranging from ‘Abattoirs’ to ‘Zulu War, 1879.’
IA does not track use of content, so we don’t know how many items have been discovered or studied online. However, IA does count downloads, copies that are made by users. MHL content has generated 187,000 downloads since the first deposit in early 2010. The single most downloaded book (currently at 702 downloads) is volume 2 of Per il XXV Anno Dell’Insegnamento Chirurgico di Francesco Durante nell’Università di Roma. 28 Febbraio 1898, edited by Roberto Alessandri (if the name Francesco Durante doesn’t ring a bell, see the MHL blog: http://www.medicalheritage.org/?p=175).
Digitization Process and Preservation
MHL partners continue to monitor the digitization process and hope to learn more about the most effective practices. We view analysis of these experiences to be an important part of our project deliverables. For example:
Participants have taken two approaches to digitization: scanning in-house and sending books to IA scanning centers. The cost comparison makes clear that in-house digitization incurs higher costs per volume; however, the non-monetary factors – the value, condition, and size of materials— must also be weighed. A hybrid solution, as employed by the Columbia University Libraries, where medium rare books in good condition are sent out for digitization, while fragile and oversized materials are scanned in-house, may be the most effective approach for many libraries.
It is a well-known secret that the cost of digitization doesn’t begin or end with the expense of scanning. The Countway Library’s Center for the History of Medicine estimates that those non-digitization tasks (selection, preparation for scanning, post-scanning quality control, and return of the volume to the shelves) require 23 minutes of staff time per volume. This number is directly influenced by a several factors, including the number of books that must be examined to identify each volume that is selected for scanning.
The MHL partners have been concerned about duplicative scanning, either within the MHL or with other projects. The MHL has considered the relative benefits of manual versus automated de-duplication. An automated solution is considerably more resource-intensive than the MHL can accommodate; instead we are combining manual de-duplication against IA holdings with assigned scanning focus areas— for example, NLM has volunteered to take responsibility for pre-1866 American imprints.
The digital collections will be maintained by the Internet Archive, but partners are considering additional approaches to preservation. Several libraries will deposit digital collections locally to ensure their preservation; others are members of the Hathi Trust and may place copies in that preservation repository.
Outreach
The MHL has established two-way communications with peer and user communities in a number of ways. Our webpage, www.medicalheritage.org, and Facebook presence (Medical Heritage Library) are frequently updated and we communicate with a broad base of peers and users via a group of nine relevant listservs.
In November 2010, to better understand how peer activities should influence its future projects, the MHL distributed a survey via listservs seeking information about digitization of medical heritage materials. There were 62 unique complete responses from different types of repositories, mostly medical school or college and university libraries. Nearly 80% had digitized some materials, though these materials were not necessarily publicly accessible. Prints and photographs were the most common type of materials digitized, followed by archives. Nearly all the respondents wanted to digitize more, both because of user demand and because they now had the internal capacity to do so. Those that did not want to continue digitizing cited lack of staff and funding. Other questions concerned locations of digitized files (mostly local or institutional), possession of regional or subject area collections that were good candidates for digitization, and funding sources. The MHL will be pursuing additional information about public availability of digitized materials, regional or subject area collections, and degree of involvement in interface development, as well as seeking more respondents throughout the U.S. and Canada. Summary analysis of survey results can be found here: http://www.medicalheritage.org/?p=413.
Partner representatives will present a lunch session at the American Association for the History of Medicine annual meeting at the end of April. This is an opportunity for us to place the MHL resources in the context of digital resources in the history of medicine and the research needs of scholars. We have also established a Scholarly Advisory Committee comprised of academics in the digital humanities, history, and history of medicine (see: http://www.medicalheritage.org/?page_id=2). Their expertise will be particularly helpful in guiding the MHL in developing delivery strategies and tools, content selection, and communications with users.
A user survey is now available on the MHL’s home page in IA and our website (http://www.medicalheritage.org/?page_id=281), and is being distributed to users at MHL partner repositories. It will shortly be sent to peers and users via listservs. The numbers of books digitized and downloaded are important output measures; still more critical are outcomes – the impact digital resources have on the work of users. We are continuing to think about how to assess these benefits.
Future Projects
This week we learned that the MHL is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Start-up grant. Rather than focusing on additional digitization, this funding will allow us to begin exploring three areas critical to the long term usefulness and sustainability of the MHL: development of an innovative, expanded (and expandable) partnership that has both sufficient structure and flexibility; incorporation of significant collaboration and scholarly engagement as business-as-usual methodologies; and planning for the development of digital tools and approaches that have utility for scholars using digital medical heritage resources. The latter will include interviews with scholars about their research and teaching methods and preferences, information that is key to improving discovery and increasing the impact of digital resources. More information about this project, and other initiatives, will be available shortly on the MHL website.
Your thoughts on any aspect of the MHL would be gratefully received; please email medicalheritage@gmail.com or leave a comment on our website or Facebook page.
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MHL Awarded NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant, April 20, 2011
The Medical Heritage Library (MHL) has received a Level-One Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. This grant will support planning activities among 10 institutions and a scholarly advisory committee to continue developing the MHL (www.medicalheritage.org). The project furthers the MHL’s mission to “provide the means by which readers and scholars across a multitude of disciplines can examine the interrelated nature of medicine and society, both to inform contemporary medicine and strengthen understanding of the world in which we live.” This groundbreaking partnership in the digital humanities will highlight unique research resources in the history of medicine held by these institutions and enhance their utility for research.
“At the most basic level of full-text searching, digitization enables scholarship that simply could not be performed otherwise,” says Scott H. Podolsky, M.D., Director of the Center for the History of Medicine, Countway Library, and Assistant Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School. “Using runs of historical journals that are fully digitized, for example, it is possible to study the development of randomized controlled trials by performing full-text searches for such terms as ‘alternate patient(s)’ or ‘alternate case(s).’ The possibilities for answering novel questions are seemingly endless, and limited chiefly by the texts that have been digitized, the metadata applied to them, and the accessibility of the resources to scholars. NEH support will help erase these limitations.”
Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at: www.neh.gov.
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CLIR 2011 Sponsors’ Symposium Features the Medical Heritage Library, April 19, 2011
The world of higher education at large continues to grapple with the changing needs of researchers brought about by emerging technologies. Although many of the technological solutions for building a more robust research infrastructure are within our grasp, the human side of this equation is unresolved. That is, we are still learning the productive ways in which to work together across professional and institutional boundaries. This was a focus of discussion at the 2011 Council on Libraries and Information Resources Sponsors’ Symposium in Arlington, VA—Collaborative Opportunities Amidst Economic Pressures. Lively discussion of the economic, institutional, and social factors that can facilitate or impede collaborative solutions filled much of the day.
My presentation, Whose Goals are They? Navigating Diverse Institutional Cultures and Shared Responsibility for Creating Digital Resources in the History of Medicine, focused on the history of the MHL project and how a diverse group of partners can support digital scholarship in the medical humanities. This presentation was part of a panel that included two other examples of successful collaborations:
- “The Making of Hydra: Common Solutions for Common Problems” by Martha Sites, Associate University Librarian for Production and Technology Services, University of Virginia
- “TextGrid: A Virtual Research Environment for the Humanities” by Heike Neuroth, Scientific Coodinator of TextGrid and Director of Research and Development, University Library of Goettingen.
Together these projects highlight three approaches to finding shared solutions for disciplinary or local issues. In the final session of the day Chuck Henry, CLIR President, divided us into groups and asked the provocative question: What is it about our policies, organizations, traditions, or practices that impedes collaboration? The list of responses ranged from resource and staffing constraints to the perhaps more challenging habits of culture and communication.
PowerPoint slides from each of the presentations are available here. CLIR will also post a summary of the afternoon session on their website with a blog or wiki to encourage wider discussion. Visit often and join in the conversation.
Lori M. Jahnke
S. Gordon Castigliano CLIR Fellow
The College of Physicians of Philadelphia
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Finding Aid Consortium Announcement, February 2011
The History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) is pleased to announce the latest release of its History of Medicine Finding Aids Consortium (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/consortium/index.html), a search-and-discovery tool for archival resources in the health sciences that are described by finding aids and held by various institutions throughout the United States. As with the initial release the new content crawled consists of finding aids delivered as EAD, PDF and HTML from a diverse institutional cohort. NLM is the world’s largest medical library and a component of the National Institutes of Health.
The site now indexes over 1,600 finding aids from 12 institutions.
The new content contributors are:
- Drexel University College of Medicine Legacy Center, Archives and Special Collections
- Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Center for the History of Medicine, Harvard Medical School and Boston Medical Library
- Otis Historical Archives, National Museum of Health and Medicine
- University of Pennsylvania Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing
- Washington University, St. Louis School of Medicine
- Yale University Library, Cushing/Whitney Medical Library
These institutions join the original consortium members:
- NLM History of Medicine Division
- Columbia University Health Sciences Library
- Medical Archives, Johns-Hopkins University Medical Institutions
- University of California-San Francisco
- University of Virginia Health Sciences Library
- Virginia Commonwealth University
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Institutional Digitization Survey, January 2011
In November and December, 2010, the MHL asked repositories holding medical heritage materials to respond to a survey regarding their past experiences and future digitization plans. Summary analysis of survey results can be found here: MHL Institutional Digitization Survey.
The MHL will be pursuing additional information regarding digitization plans and practices. If your repository has not completed the survey and would like to participate, please contact: medicalheritage@gmail.com.
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Watermark, June 2010
Shaping a Digital Library for Medical Heritage
The Medical Heritage Library – a project funded by the Open Knowledge Commons via a Sloan Foundation grant– will digitize 30,000 public domain books from the collections of the National Library of Medicine, New York Public Library, and the medical libraries of Columbia, Harvard and Yale over the next eighteen months. These partner libraries joined together because they recognized that creating a ‘next generation’ digital library exceeds the capability of any one partner to undertake. By joining together, they will be able to foster a Medical Heritage Library that furthers their respective missions as well as the interests of the history of medicine community.
New Approaches to Digital Content
Over the past twenty years, the availability of digital content has radically altered user expectations and research methods. Archives and special collections in the history of medicine have responded with a number of initiatives, most of which offer content, contextual information, and user interfaces with search capabilities. The number of sources for digital content continues to grow. This embarrassment of riches, however, presents its own challenges: libraries face the prospect of investing scarce resources in digitizing published materials that have already been digitized by others. Users struggle to stay up-to-date on new content sources and, due to the lack of a central portal, must learn multiple user interfaces and repeat searches.
Other communities are innovating to solve such problems and further digital scholarship:
- The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is an international collaborative project that focuses on mass digitization of the biodiversity literature, close linkage to user communities, and development of research tools, both sponsored by the BHL and by users through open application programming interfaces (Open API) and web services that allow remixing and reuse of BHL content. Partner libraries work together to reduce duplication in digitization, thus creating administrative efficiencies. Content is public domain or licensed through agreement with rights holders and is freely available.
- The HATHI Trust, a collaborative of American universities, is a shared digital repository that provides preservation and access to content from digitization projects, including the Internet Archive, Google Books, and university-sponsored digitization efforts. HATHI is developing tools and actively encourages tool development by others through an Open API. Partners pay a fee on deposit and annually to support preservation of their digital content. Users benefit from the ability to search easily across the digital holdings of multiple libraries.
- The NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship) is an alliance of academic organizations and repositories that seek to link the archive to scholarship in the digital environment. The NINES provides access to best practices in digital scholarship, software tools, and federated, peer-reviewed online publishing for those scholars working in the ‘long Victorian’ century (1780-1920). Using Collex, a software tool, users can, for example, collect, annotate, and tag online objects and to repurpose them in illustrated, interlinked essays or exhibits. Collex captures user activity as metadata, thus adding additional context to objects.
These projects involve selection, digitization, and access; what qualifies them as ‘next generation’ is the degree to which they are user-centered, even user-driven, innovative, and deeply collaborative. Could the history of medicine community engage in such ‘radical collaboration’ to increase the operational efficiency and the effectiveness of efforts to support digital scholarship?
The Medical Heritage Library
In 2009, Maura Marx of the Open Knowledge Commons encouraged representatives of several libraries to begin thinking about how to respond to this question. Over the spring and summer, the library partners began to outline the components of phase I of a Medical Heritage Library project. These included many of the elements of peer projects: a commitment to freely available content; digitization in a focused subject area– the intersection of medicine and society– that would enable the rapid development of a deep research collection; a registry or de-duplication tool to prevent the waste of resources resulting from digitization of duplicates; and, perhaps most importantly, ongoing planning for the future of the MHL that would include broad consultation with peers and users, and, in phase II, the creation of an access portal and the addition of more library partners.
Phase I, funded in 2010 by the Sloan Foundation, is now underway. A copy of all content will be deposited in the Internet Archive, a temporary solution to meet MHL’s commitment to free and open access. The National Library of Medicine is preparing to digitize all American imprints up to 1865. Other partners have begun digitizing medical school catalogs, directories, and public health reports, and rare books in such areas as psychiatry, anesthesia, plastic surgery, medical jurisprudence, obstetrics, and pediatrics, to 1923 for American imprints and to 1908, in most cases, for European imprints.
MHL partners seek the views of librarians, archivists, and researchers across the history of medicine community. MHL sponsored an open session in Rochester, MN, April 2010, in conjunction with the ALHHS annual meeting, so community members could hear from Martin R. Kalfatovic, Smithsonian Institution, about the origins and ongoing development of the BHL, and to discuss a heritage library for medicine. Meeting participants were asked and offered ideas about next steps for the project. How the MHL evolves will be influenced by the interest and expertise of community members. For example, MHL founding partners are now working with the College of Physicians of Philadelphia and others interested in seeking funding for the development of an online collaborative digital environment to support interdisciplinary digital scholarship in the history of medicine. Such a project could include digitization of a test collection of archival materials, as well as the development of tools for scholars, students, and others such as search, annotation, and communication. The test collection could be augmented by digitized rare books produced in phase I of MHL. Ideally, such an environment, when implemented, would harvest the breadth of the MHL content, but would enable more than discovery. It could be the locus for digital research, collaboration, and publication tools, fully supporting the research endeavor and the history of medicine community.
People interested in sharing their ideas or learning more about MHL can contact Kathryn Hammond Baker (kbaker@hms.harvard.edu; 617-432-6205) or representatives of other partner institutions. Look for a formal survey, to be distributed to ALHHS members later this summer. Additional information about MHL progress will be forthcoming soon.
