As of March 4, 2011, there were 3,326 items from the Francis A. Countway Library digitized and available for download from the Medical Heritage Library on the Internet Archive.
The obvious question is: are they being used?
A staff member decided to find out and discovered that in February alone, there were over 6,000 downloads of items from the Countway. And that was just one month. Overall, there have been more than 38,000 downloads of material from the Countway.
A download, in case you’re curious, is counted when a given user visits the page for a particular book (for example, Alfred Dale Covey’s 1911 The Secrets of Specialists) and actually clicks in to view the page or file. Just visiting the URL for the book doesn’t trip the Internet Archive’s download counter; neither does turning pages within a given book trip the counter.
This means that the material the MHL is busy putting out into the digital world is being sought out and used! We’re delighted that so many scholars are finding our material useful and we’re looking forward to making more items available in the coming months.
As always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!