Tag: digital humanities

Learning from Users

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The MHL’s National Endowment for the Humanities “Digital Humanities Start-Up” project is underway (see: http://www.medicalheritage.org/2011/08/mhl-project-updates/). We are meeting with faculty, graduate students, and administrators at partner organizations to learn from them how they use digital sources in teaching and research, their ideal solutions to overcoming teaching and research obstacles, and how they envision the MHL supporting their work. This data will inform the near-term development of the MHL and its goals for the future. Continue reading

Digital Connections: Old Bailey Online

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The Old Bailey Online may not seem like the most obvious resource for researchers interested in the history of medicine. According to the project’s mission statement, it “…makes available a fully searchable, digitised collection of all surviving editions of the Old Bailey Proceedings from 1674 to 1913, and of the Ordinary of Newgate’s [prison chaplain] Accounts between 1676 and 1772. It allows access to over 197,000 trials and biographical details of approximately 2,500 men and women executed at Tyburn, free of charge for non-commercial use.” The website also provides access to digital images of pages from the Proceedings and Ordinary’s Accounts. There’s an additional resource for those particularly interested in the accounts from the Newgate chaplain at the London Lives: Ordinary’s Accounts site, a sister project to the Old Bailey Online. Continue reading

Digital Connections: Embryo Encyclopedia

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In a new series on the MHL blog, I’m going to be putting together a semi-regular series on other collections and tools that you might find useful. If you think there’s something I missed — something that should have a home on our “Tools for Digital Research” page, maybe? — please let me know! The email is medicalheritage (one word) at gmail dot com.

This week, I want to point out the Embryo Project Encyclopedia. Continue reading

Open Data Summer Project

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If you happen to have some free time on your hands this summer, why not consider entering the JISC Discovery Programme‘s Open Data Challenge?

The aim of the challenge is to use material from one of ten rich data-sets to create a software application which will allow users to discover “treasures” that might otherwise go missed in the mass of data. Entrants can draw upon data-sets from the British Library, the UK’s National Archives, circulation data from UK university libraries, and data from the Tyne and Wear Museums collections. Continue reading

Googling the British Library

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Digitisation is opening up the British Library's collectionIn an announcement made earlier this month, the British Library and Google made public their joint agreement to allow the Google Books scanning service access to over 200,000 volumes from the British Library. This will encompass over 40 million pages of out-of-copyright material. While Google recently experienced a major setback to its scanning projects with the failure of the author settlement, the prospect of free access to some of the British Library’s unique materials is creating excitement in the digital libraries and digital humanities communities. Continue reading

National Library of Medicine Releases “Medicine in the Americas,” Featuring Digitized Versions of American Medical Books Dating Back to 1745

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From Anatomical Tables of the Human Body, William Cheselden, 1796.

From Practical horse farrier, or, The traveller's pocket companion: shewing the best method to preserve the horse in health...,William Carver, 1820.

The National Library of Medicine, the world’s largest medical library and a component of NIH, announces the release of Medicine in the Americas. A digital resource encompassing over 350 early American printed books, Medicine in the Americas makes freely available original works demonstrating the evolution of American medicine from colonial frontier outposts of the 17th century to research hospitals of the 20th century. Continue reading

Historic New Orleans

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Via a recent posting to the Caduceus-L  listserv, we learn that the Rudolph Matas Library of Tulane University is announcing the opening of its online collection of New Orleans Charity Hospital Reports.  Available through the Internet Archive, the Rudolph Matas website, and LOUISiana Digital Library Collection of Collections, the collection of reports spans over 100 years from 1842 to 1974. Researchers can browse the reports online or download the reports in .pdf form from the Matas website or browse them at the Internet Archive. Continue reading