Tag: news

The UK MHL Is On Its Way!

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At the end of last July, the Wellcome Library, a MHL partner, announced the creation of the UK MHL project. The project plans to digitize about 15 million pages worth of content from ten partners, including UCL (University College London), the University of Leeds, the University of Glasgow, the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, King’s College London and the University of Bristol and the libraries of the Royal College of Physicians of London, the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh and the Royal College of Surgeons of England.

Over the summer, the Wellcome worked with the Internet Archive to create a large scanning center on Euston Road, capable of housing over a dozen scanning units and thousands of books in process. Fourteen staffers work at the Euston center and they’re currently working through materials from University College London, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Glasgow University Library, and the Wellcome.

Christy Henshaw, Digitization Programme Manager at the Wellcome, has written a great blog post walking us through the process of selection and digitization:

The work begins with the hard copy books in their home libraries. Partner libraries select the books and check condition, size, and suitability for digitisation. They provide accurate inventories, information on special handling requirements where necessary, and carry out any necessary repairs or preparations such as splitting any pesky uncut pages and marking the start and end of books or pamphlets that are bound together. They carefully pack the books into large crates for shipment – and may prepare anything from 4 – 15 crates in a single shipment.

Read the rest of her post here!

Packing books at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh to send to the Euston Scan Centre. Image credit: Iain Milne.

Packing books at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh to send to the Euston Scan Centre. Image credit: Iain Milne.

Year One of “Expanding the Medical Heritage Library” Is Complete!

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We have just submitted our first year report on our second National Endowment for the Humanities-funded grant, “Expanding the Medical Heritage Library: Preserving and Providing Online Access to Historical Medical Periodicals.” Under this grant, we have been digitizing numerous 19th century American medical journals (approximately 1,863 volumes so far!) and we’ve excerpted some of the highlights below.

The College of Physicians of Philadelphia
The College staff were particularly excited about a number of our selections. Among the most significant contributions were 147 volumes comprising the four leading 19th‐century homeopathy journals (American homoeopathist/American homoeopath/American physician, Hahnemannian monthly, Homoeopathic physician, and Homeopathic recorder). Additionally, we included the entire run of the Transactions of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, which includes a complete run of all volumes published throughout more than 200 years (volumes were published in 1793 and 1841‐2002). As the holder of the journals’ copyright, the College of Physicians agreed to release these volumes freely into the public domain for this project. The Transactions include proceedings from meetings, lists of Fellows, and detailed appendices that collectively describe how the College of Physicians shaped and engaged with emerging American medical trends.

Columbia University Libraries/Information Services
Columbia digitized 71 titles, the bulk of which came from the last quarter of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th. These were years when U.S. medicine came of age – from its disorganized, underfunded, and generally unscientific state in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War to a powerful, scientifically cutting‐edge, and lavishly financed medical establishment by the end of the First World War. Many of the journals Columbia chose to digitize were created by emerging specialties such as dermatology and venereology; pediatrics; and neurology/psychiatry. They also concentrated on public health and climatology journals knowing that these cover an unusually broad range of topics that appeal to researchers in a wide range of disciplines. Additionally, they included many New York City journals since their holdings of these were usually complete. These included the Brooklyn Medical Journal and its successor, the Long Island Medical Journal (1888‐1922); the long‐running and influential New York Medical Journal (1865‐1922); and two New York German‐language journals: the New Yorker Medicinische Monatsschrift (1852‐53) and the New Yorker Medizinische Presse (1885‐1888).

Yale University’s Cushing/Whitney Medical Library
The titles Yale chose represent a variety of themes, from deafness to dentistry. Yale choose the journals, in collaboration with partners, based on perceived need, as many of the titles were not fully available digitally, allowing Yale to fill in gaps. A significant title selected by Yale was the American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb, a Connecticut journal that holds importance as one of the oldest journals in English that focuses on the education of the deaf.

MHL Housekeeping

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This is a brief mid-week post to remind you of two upcoming things.

1. The MHL full-text search will be unavailable between October 24th and October 26th (this weekend) due to a hardware change-over at Harvard. The full collection will be available as usual via the Internet Archive.

This will only affect the full-text search and the search should be back in operation on Monday morning.

2. The countdown to the close of the 2014 User Survey starts next week! If you haven’t already, please take ten minutes out of your day and fill it out. We want to get a sense of how you found us, what you use (or don’t use), and how you use it so we can plan our future development.

It’s very short (we promise!) and an incredible amount of help to us to have your input.

MHL Partner History of Modern Biomedicine Research Group Celebrates 21st Anniversary

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The History of Modern Biomedicine Research Group at Queen Mary’s University, London, joined the MHL in 2013; this fall, they are celebrating their 21st birthday.

The research group, funded by the Wellcome Trust, was set up in 1990 to develop and strengthen links between members of the biomedical research community and medical historians.

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Call for Guest Bloggers!

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We want you to come write for us!

Have you used MHL materials to write? to teach? to research? to data-mine? to make art? just to read?

Have you thought of a way you’re going to use the material in a future class or project?

Do you see an interesting research path opening up with our material?

If you’re a student, a professor, a high school teacher, an independent researcher, a librarian, or a type of user we haven’t thought of here, we’d love to have you write a post on this blog. Posts should be between 200-500 words (this can be flexible) and relevant to a general academic audience.

To discuss specifics either:

Leave a comment on this post,

Hit us up on Twitter, or

Email us at medicalheritagelibrary@gmail.com.

MHL Partner Wellcome Library Announces Institutions in UK MHL Project

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By JLPhillips (Own work) [CC-BY-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Wellcome Library Reading Room. (JL Phillips, Wikimedia Commons)

The Wellcome Library, an MHL principal contributor, announced in March of 2014 a project designed in partnership with Jisc and Research Libraries UK  and now with support from the Higher Education Funding Council for England that will digitize over 30,000 nineteenth century rare books to form the core of a UK Medical Heritage Library (UK MHL). MHL and UK MHL content will be copied and shared across the two repositories.

Yesterday the Wellcome Library and Jisc announced its collaborators in the ambitious digitization project: UCL (University College London), the University of Leeds, the University of Glasgow, the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, King’s College London, and the University of Bristol along with the libraries of the Royal College of Physicians of London, the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, and the Royal College of Surgeons of England. These libraries join the 22 MHL collaborators from the United States, Canada, and the UK to create an international digital library collaboration comprised of some of the most renowned medical special collections in the world.

The MHL is proud to be associated with the library leaders and organizations who are working to make research resources more accessible and useful to the global scholarly community. 

From the  Wellcome Library press release, courtesy of Holly Story and Simon Chaplin:  

Approximately 15 million pages of printed books and pamphlets from all ten partners will be digitised over a period of two years and will be made freely available to researchers and the public under an open licence. By pooling their collections the partners will create a comprehensive online library. The content will be available on multiple platforms to broaden access, including the Internet Archive, the Wellcome Library, and Jisc Historic Books.

The project’s focus is on books and pamphlets from the 19th century that are on the subject of medicine or its related disciplines. This will include works relating to the medical sciences, consumer health, sport and fitness, as well as different kinds of medical practice, from phrenology to hydrotherapy. Works on food and nutrition will also feature: around 1400 cookery books from the University of Leeds are among those lined up for digitisation. They, along with works from the other partner institutions, will be transported to the Wellcome Library in London where a team from the Internet Archive will undertake the digitisation work. The project will build on the success of the US-based Medical Heritage Library consortium, of which the Wellcome Library is a part, which has already digitised over 50 000 books and pamphlets.

Simon Chaplin, Head of the Wellcome Library, said: “We are pleased that these nine institutions have chosen to add their valuable collections to the Medical Heritage Library. As well as our partners Jisc and Research Libraries UK, we will be working closely with our Academic Advisory Group to produce an online resource that is both a repository for a superb wealth of content and an effective research tool for a broad range of users.”

Peter Findlay, digital portfolio manager, Jisc, said: “We are delighted that the Wellcome Library team has been able to identify such valuable collections, which will be digitised to a high standard, freed from the confines of their original format and made openly available for teaching, learning and research. By working closely with the partner institutions to build the UK Medical Heritage Library, we are converting books into searchable data so that users can explore every aspect of 19th-century medicine and develop new insights into this period of unprecedented medical discovery.”

The UK MHL initiative started in 2013 when the Wellcome Library embarked on a project with the Internet Archive to digitise their collection of 19th-century medical books. The project was extended earlier in 2014 with the support of Jisc and the Higher Education Funding Council for England. It was co-designed with Research Libraries UK and is informed by an Academic Advisory Group to ensure that the best collections are included. 

For the Wellcome Library this forms part of a larger ambition to digitise and make freely available over 50 million pages of historical medical books, archives, manuscripts and journals by 2020.

More at the Wellcome Library website.

AAHM Workshop, Negotiating Access to Patient Related Materials: A Conversation between Archivists and Historians, Highlights Researcher Needs

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On Saturday, May 10, 2014 members of the Private Practices, Public Health project team hosted a lunch session at the 2014 annual meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine in Chicago. The session, Negotiating Access to Patient Related Materials: A Conversation between Archivists and Historians, represents efforts by the Medical Heritage Library, Harvard Medical School, and Johns Hopkins University to develop best practices for archivists to speed access to patient-related and patient-generated records that are informed by the working realities of researchers and historians. keys

Session panelists included Phoebe Evans Letocha, Collections Management Archivist, Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives at Johns Hopkins, who provided attendees with an overview of HIPAA and what has changed as a result of 2013 revisions to the Privacy Rule; historians Janet Golden, Rutgers University, and Cynthia Connolly, University of Pennsylvania, who shared with the audience their research experiences and difficulties using patient records to inform their research; and Emily R. Novak Gustainis, Head, Collections Services, Center for the History of Medicine, who presented on findings for the survey, Research Access to Protected Records Containing Health Information About Individuals, which sought to elicit information from researchers about what they want from descriptive guides to historical collections containing patient information. The session was moderated by Scott Podolsky, Director of the Center for the History of Medicine and newly elected AAHM Councilor.

Session participants generated a number of points for archivists to consider, including:

  • Opening up communications with institutional compliance officers to develop best practices for assessing the “real” risk using patient records for historical research presents to institutions
  • Developing better ways to communicate to institutional review boards (IRBs) that historians do not want to distribute research unethically
  • Forging a partnership between the American Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM), the Society of American Archivists (SAA), and a professional legal organization to help explain the different access laws to both archivists and researchers state by state and to help advocate for a more consistent researcher experience through more uniform laws
  •  Crowd-sourcing information on collections with restricted content through researcher participation to help future historians understand whether or not they should pursue an IRB

Feedback from the session will also be incorporated in to Gustainis and Letocha’s presentations at the August 2014 meeting of the Society for American Archivists as part of the session, Partners in Practice: Archivists and Researchers Collaboratively Improving Access to Health Collections.

The MHL Welcomes a New Content Contributor: University of Toronto Dentistry Library

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379 items from the University of Toronto H.R. Abbot Memorial Library and Dentistry Library have been added to the Medical Heritage Library.

The collection includes items such as Dentistry in the Bible and Talmud, The Teeth, and a large number of periodicals, including Oral Health  and The Dental Advertiser.

The Dentistry Library is formally known as the H.R. Abbott Memorial Library and the Dentistry Library, University of Toronto (UofT). The Memorial library was established in 1924, upon the death of Dr. Abbott’s sister, whose will provided for the establishment and maintenance of a dental library with a trust fund to be administered by the Royal College of Dentists of Ontario. The Dentistry Library was informally established in the late 1880s to support the curriculum needs of the students and faculty. It includes dental and some basic sciences titles. Currently, includes over 30,000 print monographs and periodicals, in addition to the rich health sciences electronic resources available of UofT Libraries.

The Medical Heritage Library (MHL) is a content centered digital community supporting research, education, and dialog that enables the history of medicine to contribute to a deeper understanding of human health and society. It serves as the point of access to a valuable body of quality curated digital materials and to the broader digital and nondigital holdings of its members. It was established in 2010 with funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation via the Open Knowledge Common to digitize 30,000 medical rare books. MHL principal contributors are The Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard University, the National Library of Medicine, the New York Academy of Medicine, the Welch Medical Library, Library of the Institute of the History of Medicine, and the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, and the Wellcome Library. The MHL also includes content contributions from Duke University, University of Massachusetts Medical School’s Lamar Soutter Library, and the Gerstein Science Information Centre, University of Toronto among others.