Starting up an old series again because I really enjoyed digging out cool images from our collections.
This one is from the Report on the migration of birds in the spring and autumn of 1885, by J A Harvie-Brown, published in 1885 in Edinburgh.
Because it’s hayfever season! Goldenrod — as seen in this lovely plate from the 1925 North American wild flowers — is gorgeous but for some people, it’s just a yellow flag to haul out the antihistamines.
Have you checked out our image collection yet? We’ve been running a harvester through the MHL collections pulling out all the images and collecting them on Flickr for easy use. There are over 2 million images there now and we’re only through the nineteenth century! Have a look and let us know what you think!
Are you looking for a way to access the millions of images locked within our hundreds of thousands of books? Recently, the Medical Heritage Library Inc. began reaping millions of images from books and journals in our online collection and providing in-depth book level metadata to these images via Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mhlimages/.
Once you select an image, you have the ability to click a link taking you back to the page in the actual online book for context. By scrolling down, you’ll discover links that allow you to:
“See all images from this book”
“See all MHL images published in the same year”
“See all images from [Contributing] Library”
Despite the massive swell of digitized texts over the past twenty years, systematically unlocking images in a large corpus of books with enough metadata to provide some basis for analysis has been a challenge. The ability to find and analyze images is on the wish list of many of the researchers using the MHL. While the metadata helps connect researchers to the actual book, the MHL at this point lacks the ability to provide a way for researchers to search for individual images within this massive corpus. We invite you to tag the Flickr images, but we are working with colleagues on a new program that will help batch tag and sort millions of images based on machine reading and recognition. We also recognize that our images filters do not always keep “visual junk” out, so please be patient as we work out the bugs. Stay tuned!
Looking through our recent uploads, this cover caught my eye: 
It’s from an anonymous “synopsis” of the papers given at a May 1886 meeting of the Society of Medical Jurisprudence and State Medicine (New York State) which was held at the Academy of Medicine (now a MHL partner!) This copy of the pamphlet was given out with the “compliments of Wm M. McLaury, M.D.,” listed as one of the trustees of the Society.
Forgot to stock in candy for Halloween? Or got snacking a little early and need to fill in the gaps? We have candy recipes for you! You just need some sugar, water, perhaps a few cooking implements, some flavors — and if you really get on a roll, maybe a little scaffolding!
Learn the basics from The confectioner (1880).
This is how many of us feel about Monday…
From Manuel de la boxe française et anglaise : méhode Leboucher (1882).
It’s a rather gloomy Monday here in Boston, so we decided to go with a classic exploration of, well, gloom.
