BIU Sante Connects European Users to the MHL

Gérard de Lairesse’s original drawing for Govert Bidloo’s Anatomia humani corporis … (Amsterdam, 1685). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire de Santé.

The Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire de Santé (BIU Santé) in Paris, the largest medical library in France with important history of medicine collections and programs, is connecting its users to the Medical Heritage Library by harvesting MHL’s metadata from Internet Archive to allow searching of its content.

The BIU Santé’s origins lie in the Faculté de Médecine of Paris, founded in the 13th century, and its oldest document dates from 1395. The Library remained modest for several centuries, but expanded enormously during the French Revolution when a number of private and religious libraries in France were nationalized, giving birth in 1795 to the institution we know today. The Library primarily serves the health sciences schools of the University of Paris.

The Library also has a long-standing digitization program, Medic@, focusing on its extensive history of medicine collections. This large digital corpus comprises over 2.6 million pages of materials scanned from over 9,000 volumes and includes in depth selections in fields such as ancient and medieval medicine, pharmacology, veterinary medicine, medical dictionaries, dentistry, and the plague, much of it with special emphasis on France.

When one types an author or title into the search box on Medic@’s homepage, however, the user not only searches the BIU Santé’s rich digital collection but metadata for nearly 50,000 books from a host of libraries with important online history of medicine collections. Among these are the digital collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France’s Gallica and the Ecole Nationale Vétérinaire de Lyon, and the over 30,000 items now available in the Medical Heritage Library’s holdings in Internet Archive. Because the BIU Santé has harvested MHL’s metadata and made it available in the same search with several other important European collections, it is a powerful tool that has generated thousands of downloads of MHL files from Internet Archive. In fact, nearly 50% of MHL’s content in IA is accessed directly from BIU Santé’s website.

This important tool brings MHL’s collections to researchers in Europe and other Francophone areas, helping MHL to reach an important international audience.

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