Entrance to The Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health. Photograph courtesy of The Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives.
Project staff at the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions are well into processing three of the four personal paper collections that were selected to be part of the CLIR project to process hidden special collections. Continue reading
Cover of Ambler’s logbook.
The Navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery’s Office of Medical History is uploading their 1000th item to the Medical Heritage Library. Oddly enough, the item, a logbook from Dr. James Ambler, is not medical. Instead it documents polar weather conditions. Continue reading
Have you tried our full text search tool yet? Did you know you can download response sets?
If not, we’d love you to check it out and let us know what you think! Email us at medicalheritage@gmail.com.
If not, we’d love you to check it out and let us know what you think! Email us at medicalheritage@gmail.com.
Due to a flood over the weekend, the US Navy’s BUMED’s Office of Medical History will have an interruption in archival services. 95% of the collection was completely unaffected, but due to wet flooring and drywall, all of it will have to be packed up and placed in storage for at least a month. A set of 19th century hospital plans and maps did get wet, but are being freeze-dried.
For the next four weeks, limited reference services will be available. Telephone service has been interrupted, and voice mail messages should not be left.
Contacts are Archivist Michael Rhode at michael.rhode@med.navy.mil
or Historian Andre Sobocinski at andre.sobocinski@med.navy.mil
We’re always adding new items to our collection. Here are some of the latest: Continue reading
In case you haven’t noticed, we’re doing some revamping of our website. Some old pages are going away, some are getting new names and new content, and some entirely new ones are being added.
If you’re looking for the page that used to be called Tools for Digital Research, we halved it: look here and here.
If you’ve got suggestions for our new resources list, please drop us an email at medicalheritage@gmail.com.
If you’re looking for the code for our embeddable search box, our API, dataset, or information on how to join our collaborative, check back soon! All of that will be coming on our Develop@MHL and Join pages!
And if you haven’t already, please take a spin on our brand new full text search tool and let us know what you think. You can enter terms in the box at the top of the right-hand sidebar or visit our new Search page that offers you two search options as well as further help and tips.
And as always for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!
We’ve made it even easier to test out our new fulltext search tool for the MHL!
Just look to your right at the top of the sidebar and you’ll see our brand new embeddable search box:
Check it out — play around and let us know what you think at medicalheritage@gmail.com.
Recently the MHL completed its first progress report for the National Endowment for the Humanities on work done during the first year of our serials digitization project. We’re going to be highlighting some of our finds here during the next couple of weeks. Continue reading
Recently the MHL completed its first progress report for the National Endowment for the Humanities on work done during the first year of our serials digitization project. We’re going to be highlighting some of our finds here during the next couple of weeks.
Lets start with: Audiences
It is difficult to quantify the audience of an open and freely available resource with multiple access points. The MHL’s main audience was intended initially to be that of its participating institutions: academic historians and students in the history of medicine and science as well as health professionals interested in the past and future development of their specializations. However, its apparent audience is much broader. This may be in part an outcome of its active programs in social media (MHL maintains a blog, a Twitter account, and a Facebook page to publicize its work) and outreach (MHL sends selected announcements and a blog digest to related listservs and submits blog posts to hub sites specializing in history of medicine, science, digital and medical humanities).
Our audience analysis must rely on a variety of measures. The Internet Archive does not collect data on users, but on downloads. As a result, we do know that during the MHL’s content building period, 3/1/2010 to date, downloads have continued to increase, with more than 2.6 million copies of the MHL’s 47,000 objects downloaded; additional items may have been queried or viewed online. Downloads span esoteric texts from the 16th century, 18th and 19th century manuals of medical practice, anatomical atlases, broad selections of popular medicine from the 16th through the 20th century, natural history, homeopathy, and spiritualism; this breadth indicates that as the “medical humanities” expands as a discipline, traditional historians of medicine continue to be joined by academics in a wide range of fields (art history, literature, linguistics, etc.). It might also suggest that the audience of the MHL extends beyond academic researchers.
The MHL’s blog is a rich source of content on current history of medicine publications, events, and digital tools, including MHL-specific search, through which we hope to attract users to pass on the way to the collection in the Internet Archive. This investment is intended to help us learn more about our audiences, but the blog’s users will always be a sample of the total MHL user base. Google Analytics on the blog indicates an average of 1,600 unique visitors to the site monthly, with 72% of these being new. Users are primarily from the United States (82%), France (3%), and the United Kingdom (2.7%), reflecting the three main sources and languages of MHL content. Most traffic derived from a Google search, either for the MHL by name or for one of the numerous medical history topics covered on the blog. Other top sources of traffic are the United States National Library of Medicine, the Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire de Santé, and the Internet Archive.
The MHL Facebook page analytics offer some ideas about gender, age, and location of followers. MHL’s 410 followers are primarily 25 to 54 years of age, from the United States (321), Japan (64), Hungary (27), and the United Kingdom (23), evenly divided from a gender perspective, and tend to be highly engaged, reposting and commenting on MHL posts. They are linked to an additional 130,000 persons; as a result of this connectedness and engagement, for example, in May 2013 between 500 and 2,700 people saw an MHL post at least weekly.
Analysis of the MHL’s Twitter audience suggests alignment with our early thoughts on the nature of the Internet Archive’s downloading users. An informal census of MHL’s 495 followers taken on May 1, 2013 showed a variety of self-identified academic historians (111), students (78), arts and humanities institutions (157) and artists, digital humanists, journalists, health professionals, and the general public (131).
