MHL Lunch Session at AAHM 2013 at Emory University

The Medical Heritage Library delivered a successful lunch session at the 2013 annual meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine, held at Emory University in Atlanta, GA, on Saturday, May 18, 2013. Entitled “Maximizing the Medical Heritage Library’s Usefulness for Research: New Content, New Tools”, the four panelists highlighted recent additions to the MHL and offered a glimpse into future plans:

Courtesy of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia

Michelle DiMeo, The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, began with an MHL overview and announcements. She navigated the website, gave an update on the progress of digitization for the NEH grant to digitize complete runs of 19th century medical journals, and announced the recent Mellon Foundation grant, administered by CLIR, awarded to two MHL partners (Harvard’s Countway and Johns Hopkins) to allow them to open currently inaccessible public health collections while developing best practice for enabling access to special collections containing protected health information.

Lori Jahnke, Emory University (formerly of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia), summarized a study conducted as part of an NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant, when the MHL interviewed 50 people on their use of digital collections. Users tended to fall into one of two categories – content-centered users or data-centered users – and she explained how the MHL’s ongoing and future plans address the issues users raised in this study.

Daniel S. Goldberg, East Carolina University, speaking as a frequent user of and adviser to the MHL, explained how the recent journal digitization project has assisted his research on 19th-century pain without lesion. He offered a narrative description of how he continues to use the digital copies in the MHL even while working in a library with the physical texts, and explained why he prefers using Google’s search engine over the MHL’s current search as provided by the Internet Archive.

Melissa Grafe, Yale University, demonstrated the MHL’s new search tool, which is currently in Beta and will soon be available for user testing on the MHL website. She explained what users will and won’t find on the search tool (as dictated by the metadata available through Internet Archive) and provided several examples of how one can improve results by refining search terms. She ended by soliciting audience feedback for how the MHL could improve this tool to generate the kinds of searches users want.

The engaged audience asked several questions and many people stayed behind to ask direct questions of the panelists. Topics addressed during the discussion period included:

– The MHL website could include a “wish list” of items they’d like to digitize, but don’t have, so that other institutions and individuals can get in touch if they have a copy for digitization. This could be a form or could be advertised via social media.
– An image search is still of interest to users. E-book indexing is important, and there is an interest in tagging images (which is not currently possible with our interface.)
– The new MHL search tool is currently in Phase I, but Phase II is schedule for an August release and Phase III should be available by December. Additional tools for data visualization may be added by Phase II.
– MHL plans to integrate its content and images with the Digital Public Library of America.
– Users remain interested in advertisements and questioned what the MHL is doing to highlight journals that contain ads. They also wanted to know if it was possible to collaborate between the partner institutions to ensure that copies with advertisements are the ones chosen for digitization.
– Newspapers would be a good addition to the collection, particularly for state-specific information.
– An option that allows the user to download a smaller selection of pages instead of the whole PDF would be desirable.
– The cost of digitization was discussed, which led to a larger conversation about workflow, budget and preservation objectives in libraries.

Overall, it was a lively and informative discussion. If you weren’t able to attend the lunch session, but you have additional ideas or feedback for the MHL, we’d invite you to email us or start up a conversation in the blog comments below!