From “American medical botany, being a collection of the native medicinal plants of the United States, containing their botanical history and chemical analysis, and properties and uses in medicine, diet and the arts, with coloured engravings ..” (1817)
Dr Christy Henshaw, Digitisation Programme Manager for the Wellcome Library, recently announced that the Library has started to harvest Medical Heritage Library (MHL) content into the Wellcome digital library. Most of the MHL content – both UK-based and US/Canada-based – will be mirrored on the Wellcome Library website.
MHL collaborators are thrilled that the MHL content will be even more accessible to its global community of users. Unlike the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), which holds copies of MHL metadata and points users to the digital objects in the Internet Archive (IA), the Wellcome Library is ingesting digital objects and metadata. The mirrored MHL content in the UK MHL provides a back up should there be any problems with MHL content in IA’s San Francisco-based repository.
The Wellcome is going slowly to begin with as it irons out various issues. There are currently 36 books available via the Wellcome player and it should be harvesting more content soon. The collection so far, largely from MHL collaborator Brandeis University, can be viewed here.
Catalog records for MHL-generated content include attribution of the contributing MHL collaborator in the “Note” field and Internet Archive (IA) digital object identifier in the “Reference number” field. This identifier can be used to trace the book back to the IA version that the Wellcome has harvested. Other metadata is drawn from the MARC records held by the IA.
For more on the Wellcome’s UK MHL initiative, see their blog post The UK MHL is on its way!