~Courtesy Beth Lander, College Librarian, Historical Medical Library, College of Physicians of Philadelphia.
The College of Physicians of Philadelphia has been awarded a $240,000 grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) to digitize 150,000 pages of primary sources related to the history of medical education.
This project, titled For the Health of the New Nation: Philadelphia as the Center of American Medical Education, 1746-1868, will digitize, describe, and provide access to lecture tickets, course schedules, theses, dissertations, student notes, faculty lectures notes, commencement addresses, opening addresses, and matriculation records, sharing not only the voices of the medical greats, but also the often unheard voices of students. Because of physicians’ flow between institutions across the city, this project would allow physically siloed material to be viewed and analyzed in one place for the first time.
Project partners for this initiative are The College of Physicians of Philadelphia; The Legacy Center, Drexel University College of Medicine; University of Pennsylvania Libraries; Pennsylvania Hospital Historic Collections; The Library Company of Philadelphia; American Philosophical Society; Thomas Jefferson University Archives and Special Collections, and PACSCL.
The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) announced the award on January 3, 2019 of over $3.8 million to fund 17 projects for 2018 Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives awards.