Teaching #HistSex with the MHL

~This post courtesy Anna J. Clutterbuck-Cook, Reference Librarian, Massachusetts Historical Society.

Photo is by Kathleen J. Barker. Used with permission.

Each summer, the Massachusetts Historical Society’s Center for Teaching History hosts a series of workshops for K-12 teachers seeking to incorporate primary sources and contemporary historical scholarship into their curriculum. For the first time this year, the Center offered a three-day workshop in teaching LGBT History. As one of the Society’s reference librarians, with some background in history of sexuality research, I volunteered to spend a morning with the group sharing topic-specific research strategies. In addition to talking about the Society’s own catalog and collections, we discussed the challenges of historically-specific terminology. I introduced them to the Homosaurus, a controlled vocabulary of terms related to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender lives, and we talked about the genres of material that might contain information about human sexuality: personal and family papers, visual materials, legal records, religious tracts, and medical literature.

 

After my presentation and a tour of the Society’s library, showcasing our own collections, the final third of the morning was spent on a research exercise in which I invited the sixteen workshop participants to search three different access tools: the Massachusetts Historical Society’s online catalog, the Digital Transgender Archive, and finally the Medical Heritage Library’s collections via the MHL’s full text search tool. My instructions were to

 

  1. Think of a research question or topic related to the history of sexuality.
  2. Brainstorm a handful of search terms (up to a dozen) related to your topic.
  3. Use these search terms in each of the three access tools.

 

To take the example search I performed for the group as a whole, we began with the question, “How did teenagers learn/think about sex in the 19th century?” Then, we brainstormed possible search terms, including:

 

  • Sex education
  • Teenager
  • Adolescent
  • Puberty
  • Family life
  • Marriage preparation
  • Premarital sex

 

Then, we performed a search in each of the three search tools listed above: the MHS catalog, the Digital Transgender Archive, and the Medical Heritage Library’s full-text search. For the Medical Heritage Library’s full-text search, we began with a broad search for “sex education” in literature published between 1800 and 1900. Because the MHL provides a full-text search, however preliminary, the search results were much different from the results in the DTA and MHS catalog and prompted fruitful conversation about how both the content of a collection and its access tools shape our approaches to finding materials.

 

The goal of this exercise was to prompt our workshop participants to think about how different types of tools produce different search results depending upon the controlled vocabularies used, the contents of the archive, and the type of search being conducted. These questions may seem basic to archivists and librarians who spend their workdays developing and using different types of search tools, but for many of our participants the discussion of historical terms and controlled vocabularies prompted them to think in entirely new ways about how to locate materials related to the history of sexuality in archival repositories and digital collections.

 

The Center for Teaching History plans to run this workshop again next summer and I look forward to expanding on this exercise, hopefully giving our participants a chance to delve into the actual items their searches uncover.

Bookworm!

Bookworm screenshot

Our Bookworm tool is live on its very own website — have you used it yet? In case you’re not in the ‘press buttons and see what happens’ school of learners, here are a few tips.

Bookworm is a search and visualization tool that allows users to graph and compare word occurrences in the full text and catalog records of all items in the MHL holdings with a user‐defined period of time. Bookworm delivers item level results and a link to each item via the graph; simply click on any point in the graph to see the results from that year.

  1. Bookworm will search 1, 2, or 3 word phrases in multiple search fields: just click the + to add a new field.
  2. Click all texts to restrict by library, language, or subject.
  3. Click the gear icon for these options:
    1. Change how you view your results.
    2. Changing the date range of the search.
    3. Change the case sensitivity of a search (it defaults to “sensitive”.)
    4. Change the metric you’re searching by (% of words, % of texts, word count, or text count).
  4. Once you’ve made any changes to your search parameters, you need to click search again to run the new query.
  5. To share a link of your results graph, click the chain link icon at top right.
  6. To export your results graph as an image or a document, click the download button at top right.
  7. Click on a point of the graph to see the results of the search from that particular point in time and get links to individual items.

If you have thoughts, comments, or questions please drop us a line.

As always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!

The Final Week!

Yesterday started the countdown of the final week of our 2014 user survey!

We’re closing it down on November 25th — that’s next Tuesday.

To date, we have over 50 responses, well over our totals in the previous two surveys. Thank you.

If you haven’t taken the survey yet or if you have students or colleagues who should know about the MHL or do use the collection, please take the survey yourself and pass the link on. 

We use this information for planning our future development so every answer is important to us: tell us what you need, what you use, and how you use it so we can get you more of it in the future.

 

Guest Post: Why Digital Collections, Why Now?

The Medical Heritage Library and its digitizing partners exist to promote and provide access to resources in the history of medicine. That history says much about who we are today—about how we practice medicine, about how we view the body, about the nature of embodied experience and what it means to be? Rare books and journals, but also more ephemeral items like pamphlets and even films are made available to the public without cost. But why digitize these items at all? Why not just leave them in the libraries of which they are a part? I’ve heard the question asked in a variety of ways and in different venues; frequently, it’s a well-meaning query about the value of brick-and-mortar institutions. And, as someone who works for such an institution, I can understand the sentiment. Even so, there are excellent reasons for digitizing our collections—and for doing it right now.

As Research Associate and Guest Curator, I spend every day surrounded by unique and hard to access historical material. The Dittrick Medical History Center and Museum, located in Cleveland, Ohio, has over 150,000 artifacts, an incredible rare book collection, and affiliation with both a medical library and a university library. When I teach the history of anatomy, I go to the Stecher Room and fetch Vesalius, or to the stacks downstairs and retrieve Gautier. When researching the history of reproduction for an exhibit, I can easily access and peruse William Hunter’s Gravid Uterus. I have, at my fingertips, a world of ideas. But it was not always so.

A few years ago, I took a position at a small university in Minnesota. One of the first hurdles I encountered as an eighteenth century historian of literature and medicine was a lack of primary sources. In the midst of turning dissertation chapters into articles, I suddenly found repeated and seemingly insurmountable obstacles between me and my sources, not just in retrieving them, but even in the search for them. My PhD had been built around those sources, and around the search engines of databases like Eighteenth Century Collections Online and for the first time I realized the apparent desert that existed beyond my alma mater’s generous holdings. In this, I was not alone.

Many researchers find themselves seriously handicapped by issues of accessibility. They struggle to surmount these difficulties in a variety of ways, including travel to other collections. I was, in fact, encouraged to do so by my institution—and yet, like many researchers, scholars, and even tenure-track faculty, I found the monetary resources very thin for such activities. Why not apply for travel funds from the libraries and collections themselves? I was lucky in receiving several travel grants, including one from the Bakken Museum and one from the College of Physicians of Philadelphia (both contributing partners to the MHL). Yet, library collections are also under pressure financially; not every important collections can support researchers—and those that do cannot support all who apply. As academics, librarians, and curators, we pride ourselves on avenues of access, on the free circulation of information, on the democratic ability for all people to engage with history, especially the history of medicine. In practice, however, such things are more and more difficult to achieve. As a scholar, I had to rely on what I could find online in (usually frustrating) digitized book searches. Discovering the Internet Archive smoothed the way for continued research, and the Medical Heritage Library further supports this mission by specifically providing many thousands of works specifically in medical history. Why digitize collections? Because this is our medical heritage—and the digital is sometimes the only means of sharing it.

Let’s return, though, to the second question: why now? There is an urgency to these projects that many recognize, but fewer understand. Digitization, though sometimes perceived as a threat to existing collections, may also be the best means of saving them. The most obvious way this occurs is through the careful cataloguing, in print and image, of fragile history. There’s only so much we can do to preserve our collections; some have survived thousands of years, but the reality is that they will continue to degrade, to fade, to become unreadable. In my office at the Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry journal, we have a pair of brilliant black-and-white photos. They depict the inside of an excavation in Egypt, where columns are bright with art work. Those columns are now empty, blank, worn away by sand and wind that entered after opening the tomb. These photos are all that remain—and so it may be with some of our treasured artifacts today. Arguments abound that, of course, even the digital will degrade, and probably faster. It’s true, but the digital also provides us the opportunity to do something more: to disseminate.

People cannot come to a library or museum if they never hear about it’ existence. The Dittrick Museum is no exception. We have been called a “hidden gem” and a “best kept secret” in our own community. To raise awareness, we’ve been hosting events, inviting classes to join us, and renovating for a more user-friendly experience. But we’ve been working on the digital, too. Our archivist and photographer are working to add our collection to a searchable system, and I—with chief curator James Edmonson—have begun the grant-writing process for an ambitious digitization of artifact and story for an interactive display. Other museums and libraries are doing the same (the Wellcome Library and Collection is an excellent example—and not surprisingly, also a principal MHL contributor). By sharing our collections digitally we reach a larger audience. We attract new visitors. We build a community of like-minded people, of scholars and researchers and curious minds young and old. In a time of tight budgets, it’s ever more important to help the wider world see and understand the relevance of libraries and other collections. In sharing this history, as the Medical Heritage Library and partners have done, we also provide the means of preserving it.

Guest Post: “Seeing With a Better Eye” Through the MHL

The MHL was kind enough to extend an invitation to guest-post regarding my usage of the MHL in the preparation of The Second Book. In this post, then, I will try to describe The Second Book as best I can, so as to frame the significance of the MHL’s holdings and resources for my work, as well as to describe specifically how I use the MHL in my daily research. Okay, sometimes the research is more like “weekly” or even “biweekly” than daily. . . Continue reading

The MHL at the HSS

The weekend before Thanksgiving, we were delighted to be a part of the 2013 History of Science Society meeting in Boston, Massachusetts. Kathryn Hammond-Baker (from the Center for the History of Medicine at the Countway Library) and Hanna Clutterbuck (Project Co-ordinator for the MHL) staffed our table on Friday and Saturday, giving out candy, postcards, and chatting with conference attendees about the MHL. Continue reading

Searching the Archive (II)

The last formal way of searching the Internet Archive, whether for content from the Medical Heritage Library or other collections, is via the advanced search function.

As you can see, advanced search allows you to construct quite a complex search. However, none of these fields are mandatory and you can enter as much or as little as you wish in any of them. You can select “contains” or “does not contain” from any of the relevant dropdown boxes to construct something like a Boolean search query. You can select custom fields in three fields to include a number of additional query terms:

The list goes on from here! The custom fields allow you to construct a highly specified search query, but you need to know a lot about your desired item in order to make them most useful.

Again, if you’re using this search function to track down a specific title in the MHL collection, the best way to go about it would be to enter what you know of the book you’re looking for — author, title, place of publication, year of publication, and so forth — and select the “American Libraries” collection. The more you know about the book, the more information you can enter into the search engine, and the more likely you are to find the requisite title quickly.

If you’re not trying to track down one particular book, however, this search function can be very helpful in returning lists of items for you to browse through: you can combine and recombine search terms, authors, titles, places, dates, and collections to create very specific lists of search results, using the functionality of the search engine to show you exactly the results you want.

For more tips on searching the MHL, check out our MHL @ Internet Archive page and as always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!

Searching the Archive (I)

In our last post about searching, we talked about how to look through items specifically in the MHL collections and through the MHL’s Internet Archive website. But you might also be looking for items with, so to speak, a broader net and want to use the Archive’s larger search functions.

From the Archive’s main page, you can do a very general search in the box at the top of the page that will cover everything and anything in the Archive’s collections. This is a great way to find out what the Archive has on a given topic or person and it works well to generate a list of items you can browse through.

If something more directed is what you had in mind, you can select a specific collection from the dropdown box on the right:

This may be most helpful if you’re looking for a given title, author, person, or subject. Reading the background on the various collections might also be useful in giving you a better idea of where something is likely to be found; for information on the WayBack Machine, the Archive itself, and some of the Moving Image collections, check out the FAQ. For more on the text projects, including American Libraries and Canadian Libraries, have a look at the Welcome page. And for more on the audio projects housed by the Archive, including the Naropa Poetics Audio Archive and Librivox, check out the project page.

If you have a title you’re looking for from the MHL collections, for example, the fastest way to find it through the main-page search function is to type as much as you know of the title into the search box and select “American Libraries” from the dropdown.

If you know only part of the title, for example, “journal of the Harvard Medical School,” try placing it in quotations, exactly as it appears in this post. The quotation marks will tell the search engine to look for the words as a phrase, rather than as individual words.

For more tips on searching the MHL, check out our MHL @ Internet Archive page and as always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!