Category: News

Call for Program Proposals Archivists and Librarians in the History of the Health Sciences/Medical Museum Association Annual Meeting

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~This post courtesy Polina Ilieva.

The Local Arrangements and Program Committees are busy preparing for the upcoming joint ALHHS/MeMA meeting in Los Angeles, May 9-10, 2018.

 

Our conference brings together archivists, librarians, museum professionals, educators, historians and representatives of allied professions and it is the place for our community to engage, network, and learn from each other’s experiences. The advent of social media, big data, and digital environments is changing the nature of the records we collect, their dissemination, as well as educational practices. The impact of this shift challenges some theoretical and methodological paradigms of our professions. The goal of this meeting is to examine critical issues in documenting, preserving, accessing, and teaching with health sciences collections in the newly emerging landscape.

 

Keynote Address: Miriam Posner, Assistant Professor of Information Studies and Digital Humanities, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)

 

The Program Committee welcomes your help in making this a thought provoking and stimulating conference. We are especially interested in proposals that feature:

  • Digital medical humanities
  • Role of health sciences collections in scholarly research
  • Changing role of health sciences libraries/archives/museums
  • How can digital methods and resources be used to engage users?
  • Collaborating with donors, students, area studies, and community archives
  • Sensitive materials and social justice — what impacts do concepts such as radical   empathy have on how material is represented in digital collections or exhibitions
  • Collecting and contextualizing social media, email, hardware, and software
  • Collections as data

 

Session Formats: The Program Committee encourages submission of proposals that may include, but are not limited to, the following formats:

 

  • Individual papers: Speakers should expect to give a presentation of no more than 15 minutes followed by 10 minutes of discussion. Individual papers will be combined into panels.
  • Panel Discussion: Open session with a panel of three (3) to four (4) individuals informally discussing a variety of theories or perspectives on the given topic(s). Please confirm participation with all panelists before submitting the panel proposal.
  • Traditional: Open session with two to three fully prepared papers of fifteen (15) minutes each and a comment and discussion period after the papers.
  • Special Focus Session: 50-minute session designed to highlight innovative archives or museum programs, new techniques, and research projects. Audience participation is encouraged.

 

Please submit your proposal (no more than 350 words) through the Session/Program Proposal Form: https://goo.gl/forms/7eQYTWFnUgAlCx0T2

 

The deadline for submitting session proposals is Friday, December 1th, 2017. Decisions about acceptance will be made by December 15th, 2017.

 

If you have any questions please contact Polina Ilieva via phone (415) 476-1024 or email polina.ilieva@ucsf.edu.

 

We are looking forward to seeing you in Los Angeles!

 

Your Program Committee:

Polina Ilieva, University of California, San Francisco (chair)

Beth Lander, College of Physicians of Philadelphia

Jennifer Nieves, Case Western Reserve University

John Rees, National Library of Medicine (History of Medicine Division)

Digitization Collaborative Provides Open Access to Over 100 Years of American Medical History through the Internet Archive

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The Medical Heritage Library has completed its National Endowment for the Humanities-funded initiative Medicine at Ground Level: State Medical Societies, State Medical Journals, and the Development of American Medicine, 1900-2000

Boston, MA, October 2, 2017. The Medical Heritage Library has released 3,907 state medical society journal volumes free of charge for nearly 50 state medical societies, including those for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, through the Internet Archive (http://www.medicalheritage.org/content/state-medical-society-journals/). The journals – collectively held and digitized by Medical Heritage Library founders and principal contributors The College of Physicians of Philadelphia; the Center for the History of Medicine, Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine; The New York Academy of Medicine Library; the Library and Center for Knowledge Management at the University of California at San Francisco; the National Library of Medicine of the National Institutes of Health; the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries; and content contributor the Health Sciences and Human Services Library, University of Maryland, Founding Campus, with supplemental journal content provided by the Brown University Library, the Health Sciences Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Pittsburgh Health Sciences Library System, and UT Southwestern Medical Center Health Sciences Digital Library and Learning Center –  consist of almost three million pages that can be searched online and downloaded in a variety of formats. State medical society journals document the transformation of American medicine at both the local and national level, serving as sites not only for scientific articles, but for medical talks, local news regarding the medical profession, pharmaceutical and device advertising, and unexpurgated musings on medicine and society throughout the 20th century.

Project supporter and former president of the American Association for the History of Medicine, Distinguished Professor of History Nancy J. Tomes, Stony Brook University, notes: “The value of this collection lies precisely in the insights state journals provide on issues of great contemporary interest. They shed light on questions at the heart of today’s policy debates: why do physicians treat specific diseases so differently in different parts of the country? Why is it such a challenge to develop and implement professional policies at the national level? How do state level developments in health insurance influence federal policy and vice versa? How do factors such as race, class, gender, and ethnicity affect therapeutic decision making? How have methods of promoting new therapies and technologies changed over time? These are issues of interest not only to historians but to political scientists, sociologists, and economists.”

The digitized collection offers unprecedented, centralized access to one of the richest resources concerning the evolution of American medicine and will open the texts to new forms of analysis in the digital humanities, such as those supporting the investigation of health trends and outcomes over time and region, as well as visualizations.

Journals were digitized between 2015 and 2017 through the National Endowment for the Humanities (grant number: PW-228226-15), with additional funding provided by the Harvard Library and the Arcadia Fund, as well as Harvard Medical School. All publications found in the collection are provided free of charge by individual journal publishers agreeing to open access for content currently under copyright. Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. For more on the NEH Office of Digital Humanities visit http://www.neh.gov/odh/.

Beyond the Internet Archive’s portal through which MHL content is delivered, the Medical Heritage Library hosts state-by-state links to the journals (http://www.medicalheritage.org/content/state-medical-society-journals/journals-by-state/) and the MHL’s advanced search interface (http://mhl.countway.harvard.edu/search/), which offers full-text, proximity, date, and language searching among other features.

 

About the Medical Heritage Library
Founded in 2010 with funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to digitize 30,000 medical rare books, the Medical Heritage Library (MHL) is a digital curation collaborative among some of the world’s leading medical libraries that promotes free and open access to quality historical resources in medicine. The MHL’s goal is to provide the means by which readers and scholars across a multitude of disciplines can examine the interrelated nature of medicine and society, both to inform contemporary medicine and strengthen our understanding of the world in which we live. The MHL’s growing collection of digitized medical rare books, pamphlets, journals, and films number over 200,000, with representative works from each of the past seven centuries, all of which are available through the Internet Archive. Information about the MHL may be found on our website, www.medicalheritage.org.

 

Media Contact
Hanna Clutterbuck-Cook
medicalheritage@gmail.com

New to the MHL!

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In case you haven’t been keeping up, here are some of the latest things to come into our collection:

See more of our latest additions right here! And you can subscribe to the RSS feed of our latest additions here.

State Medical Society Journal Digitization Project Wrapping Up

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Our latest digitization project, state medical society journals, is in its last months. We’re working on the final report to the National Endowment for the Humanities (#SavetheNEH, by the way!) and the last few volumes are going into the collection.

There’s more than one way you can access the material. There is, of course, the main collection page on the Internet Archive, but we’re also working on a more detailed list by state and we hope to supplement this list with links to each journal title individually.

You will automatically search the state medical journals project as part of the main MHL collection if you use the IA search box from our main collection page and you can also use our own full-text search tool. Scroll down to “collections” and select “statemedicalsocietyjournals” to use all the power of our search tool for this body of material.

New York Academy of Medicine Library Launches New Digital Collections Website

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de Chauliac_watermarkThe New York Academy of Medicine Library announced
today the launch of its new digital collections and exhibits website, hosted on the open-source framework Islandora and accessible at http://digitalcollections.nyam.org/. The new site makes it easy for the public to access and explore highlights of the Library’s world-class historical collections in
the history of medicine and public health.

“The Academy is committed to enhancing access to our Library’s world-class collections through digitization,” said Academy President Jo Ivey Boufford, MD.
“With the launch of our new digital collections and exhibits website, users across
the globe will have access to an ever-growing number of important resources in the
history of medicine and public health.”

VESALIUS ICONES SUITE_010_watermark2
The website includes a glimpse into the Library’s rare and historical collections material. In one day, high-end photographer Ardon Bar-Hama, courtesy of George Blumenthal, took photos of a subset of the Library’s treasures, which are all accessible via the new website. Visitors interested in cookery can page through the Library’s Apicius manuscript with 500 Greek and Roman recipes from the 4th and 5th centuries. Other highlights includes beautiful anatomical images from Andreas Vesalius’s De Humani corporis Fabrica and striking botanicals like this skunk cabbage
(Symplocarpus Foetida) hand-colored plate from William P. C. Barton’s
Vegetable Materia Medica.

AyersHairVigor_watermarkAlso featured is The William H. Helfand Collection of Pharmaceutical Trade Cards, which contains approximately 300 colorful pharmaceutical trade cards produced in the U.S. and France between 1875 and 1895 that were used to advertise a wide range of goods in the nineteenth century. Such cards are now regarded as some of the
best source material for the study of advertising, technology and trade in the post-Civil War period.

“It is gratifying to digitize our materials and see them come to life with the launch,”
said Robin Naughton, PhD, Head of Digital for the Library. “Our digital collections and
exhibits website represent a bridge between the Academy Library’s collections and
the world as it intersects with the humanities and technology.”

The Library will continue to launch new digital collections and exhibits, including
“How to Pass Your O.W.L.’s at Hogwarts: A Prep Course,” which celebrates the 20th
anniversary of the publication of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and will be
launched on June 26. Two other upcoming digital projects focus on the history of the
book: “Facendo Il Libro/Making the Book,” funded by the Gladys Krieble Delmas
Foundation, and “Biography of a Book,” funded by a National Endowment for the
Humanities Digital Projects for the Public grant.

About The New York Academy of Medicine Library
The Academy is home to one of the most significant historical libraries in medicine
and public health in the world, safeguarding the heritage of medicine to inform the
future of health. The Library is dedicated to building bridges among an
interdisciplinary community of scholars, educators, clinicians, and the general
public, and fills a unique role in the cultural and scholarly landscape of New York
City. Serving a diverse group of patrons—from historians and researchers to
documentary filmmakers to medical students and elementary school students—the
Academy collections serve to inform and inspire a variety of audiences from the
academic to the public at large.

Freeing the LAMS from the Silos; or, How We Learned to Love MARC for the Sake of BIBFRAME

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On April 1st, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia released what we lovingly refer to as the “Digital Spine,” one of the few MHL_image_1catalogs in the United States that merges descriptions of, and access to, library, archival and museum collections.

Approximately 145,000 bibliographic records for collections in the Historical Medical Library and approximately 28,000 records for objects in the Mütter Museum will be merged in a single, cross-searchable database.  To sample this integration, go to https://cpp.ent.sirsi.net/client/en_US/library and search for “foreign bodies.”

MHL_image_2

 

 

 

Museum records are slowly being released into the online public access catalog (OPAC).  One of the biggest problems with integrating these two collections is the lack of standardization for describing museum objects (of any kind).  In library description, we have “title.” In museum description, something akin to a title can be found in “Remarks” or “Description” or “Object Description” or “Object Name.”  Building crosswalks between library and museum descriptions is an engaging activity.

MHL_Image_3

 

Another problem is the interim use of the MARC format to catalog museum objects.  The long-term goal of the Digital Spine project is to expose collections metadata to crawling by search engines.  In order to do this, we had to start with MARC, which seems antithetical, since MARC is not a structure that is understood by search engines. The College selected SirsiDynix as the vendor for this project because of SirsiDynix’ recent release of its BLUEcloud LSP.  BLUEcloud Visibility pulls a library’s records and transforms them using BIBFRAME, which exposes catalog records as linked data.  Here, for example, is part of the “Person” record for Chevalier L. Jackson, the “father” of American laryngology, whose foreign body collection, items referenced above, is one of the first museum collections to be released into the OPAC.

 

MHL_image_4

 

In the near future, we anticipating spending a lot of time tidying museum records and releasing them to the OPAC; retrospectively cataloging original library material that never made it into the original conversion to electronic format; and working with SirsiDynix to create an archives “module” to accommodate hierarchically described collections.  In the long term, we plan to expand the reach of our metadata as linked data – how extensible can we be?  In answering that question, we will truly free the LAMs from the silo.

 

 

The MHL at AAHM 2017!

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Have ideas for digitization or digital projects using MHL materials?  Would you like to meet members of the MHL? Visit us at Studio 7 in the AAHM conference hotel Saturday in Nashville from 8-8:30 a.m.!  Bring some breakfast and tell us about your work, or feel free to email our Project Co-ordinator at hanna_clutterbuck@hms.harvard.edu.

Yale Medicine Goes to War

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Melissa Grafe, current co-chair of the MHL Governance Committee and John R. Bumstead Librarian for Medical History at the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, participated in two video presentations for the Yale Office of Public Affairs and Communications to commemorate the WWI centennial and the Medical Library’s exhibits on the war.

Yale Goes to War – Profiles in Medicine
and

Yale Goes to War – Mobile Hospital No. 39
 

Check out more MHL resources on World War I here.