Have you used the Medical Heritage Library to inform your research? Have you created an interesting class project based on one of our digitized items? If so, we’d like to hear from you!
The MHL will be hosting a lunch session at the American Association for the History of Medicine 2013 Annual Meeting, to be held in Atlanta on May 16-19 2013. Entitled “Maximizing the Medical Heritage Library’s Usefulness for Research: New Content, New Tools”, the session will begin with an overview of a study conducted in 2011-2012, where over 50 users were interviewed about their use of digital content in teaching and research. After this overview we will host an informal roundtable for scholars to share their own experience using the MHL. We have already identified some discussants, but we hope to include a few more to stimulate a more diverse discussion. If you have used the resources of the MHL for your own work – whether as researcher or teacher – we would like to invite you to join us! You will only need to prepare a brief 5-minute overview and be willing to talk informally about your own experiences during the discussion period.
If you’re not able to commit to participating in the roundtable, we hope you’ll still attend the lunch session for a lively discussion which will introduce new digital resources! We will update the audience on our new CLIR “Hidden Collections” grant-funded project in which we will be preparing for research access six manuscript collections of public health leaders. We’re using this opportunity to investigate, with records creators, archivists, and researchers, methods to enable access to collections containing personal and medical data. . We will also be seeking feedback for how we can improve the user experience: what would you like to see digitized next? Finally, the MHL will showcase a new prototype database that includes indexed content and catalog records of its text-based holdings. This new dataset will allow data-oriented users to search across the entire library and may provide new possibilities for digital humanists, including data-mining and visualization. After a brief demonstration, the audience will be able to provide feedback on the database to inform further development and use.
If you are interested in joining us as a discussant on the roundtable, please email Michelle DiMeo at mdimeo@collegeofphysicians.org with a brief description of the research or teaching project you’d like to present. Potential discussants must be in touch before January 31 at the latest, but available opportunities will be immediately filled over the course of the month. If you cannot attend AAHM 2013 but you would like us to present your project on your behalf, please email Michelle DiMeo before February 28.