I wanted to thank all our MHL users for the support you’ve shown us over the past 11 years. We started in 2009 in an effort to bring a consortial model to digitization of medical heritage materials across different types of institutions. I began co-chairing the MHL in 2015 after the death of our leader, Kathryn Hammond Baker, who was Deputy Director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the Countway Library at Harvard University. Kathryn successfully guided the MHL in the early years, and with the governance committee, established our website, wrote several digitization grants, and generally set the path for our organization. Being relatively new to the organization and working full-time as Head of the Medical Historical Library at Yale University, I knew I needed help to fill Kathryn’s large shoes.
Working with Emily Novak Gustainis, current Deputy Director of the Center and MHL co-chair, we expanded the MHL’s footprint with our amazing partners. The MHL now has over 320,000 items in our Internet Archive instance and over 4,000,000 images drawn from these collections residing in our Flickr account. With the addition of the Wellcome Library and the Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de Santé (BIU Santé) as international governance members, the MHL includes fabulous collections from these illustrious institutions, accounting for over half of the MHL corpus. Our international and national governance members, including the National Library of Medicine, UCSF Library, the New York Academy of Medicine, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University, the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library at Yale University (where I’m from), and the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard, sustain the MHL, contributing funding, time, effort, collections, and resources to keep our organization going. We also appreciate all the content contributors that tag their collection in Internet Archive with the MHL tag.
In 2018, with particular help from Beth Lander, College Librarian at the College of Physicians, the MHL embarked on a journey to become a stand-alone, incorporated non-profit, which we achieved in 2019, ten years after our founding. I became the first president of the MHL in 2018, with my term ending on June 30th, 2020. The MHL started a fellowship program in 2018 to bring fresh voices to bear on every aspect of our work. Our fellows have delved into our user base to better understand ways to reach our audiences, created curated primary source sets on vaccination and disability, and analyzed the infrastructure supporting our Advanced search. We are happy to introduce Kim Adams as our fellow for this year, who will be helping us expand our outreach efforts and organize our first virtual symposium.
Please join me in welcoming our new President, Emily Novak Gustainis. She is an incredible person and will lead the MHL in amazing directions moving forward. We look forward to your continued support as our users, and encourage you to share stories on how you use the MHL in your research, teaching, learning, and world. Email us at medicalheritage@gmail.com.