Category: News

MHL Partner Wellcome Library Announces Institutions in UK MHL Project

  By

 

By JLPhillips (Own work) [CC-BY-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Wellcome Library Reading Room. (JL Phillips, Wikimedia Commons)

The Wellcome Library, an MHL principal contributor, announced in March of 2014 a project designed in partnership with Jisc and Research Libraries UK  and now with support from the Higher Education Funding Council for England that will digitize over 30,000 nineteenth century rare books to form the core of a UK Medical Heritage Library (UK MHL). MHL and UK MHL content will be copied and shared across the two repositories.

Yesterday the Wellcome Library and Jisc announced its collaborators in the ambitious digitization project: UCL (University College London), the University of Leeds, the University of Glasgow, the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, King’s College London, and the University of Bristol along with the libraries of the Royal College of Physicians of London, the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, and the Royal College of Surgeons of England. These libraries join the 22 MHL collaborators from the United States, Canada, and the UK to create an international digital library collaboration comprised of some of the most renowned medical special collections in the world.

The MHL is proud to be associated with the library leaders and organizations who are working to make research resources more accessible and useful to the global scholarly community. 

From the  Wellcome Library press release, courtesy of Holly Story and Simon Chaplin:  

Approximately 15 million pages of printed books and pamphlets from all ten partners will be digitised over a period of two years and will be made freely available to researchers and the public under an open licence. By pooling their collections the partners will create a comprehensive online library. The content will be available on multiple platforms to broaden access, including the Internet Archive, the Wellcome Library, and Jisc Historic Books.

The project’s focus is on books and pamphlets from the 19th century that are on the subject of medicine or its related disciplines. This will include works relating to the medical sciences, consumer health, sport and fitness, as well as different kinds of medical practice, from phrenology to hydrotherapy. Works on food and nutrition will also feature: around 1400 cookery books from the University of Leeds are among those lined up for digitisation. They, along with works from the other partner institutions, will be transported to the Wellcome Library in London where a team from the Internet Archive will undertake the digitisation work. The project will build on the success of the US-based Medical Heritage Library consortium, of which the Wellcome Library is a part, which has already digitised over 50 000 books and pamphlets.

Simon Chaplin, Head of the Wellcome Library, said: “We are pleased that these nine institutions have chosen to add their valuable collections to the Medical Heritage Library. As well as our partners Jisc and Research Libraries UK, we will be working closely with our Academic Advisory Group to produce an online resource that is both a repository for a superb wealth of content and an effective research tool for a broad range of users.”

Peter Findlay, digital portfolio manager, Jisc, said: “We are delighted that the Wellcome Library team has been able to identify such valuable collections, which will be digitised to a high standard, freed from the confines of their original format and made openly available for teaching, learning and research. By working closely with the partner institutions to build the UK Medical Heritage Library, we are converting books into searchable data so that users can explore every aspect of 19th-century medicine and develop new insights into this period of unprecedented medical discovery.”

The UK MHL initiative started in 2013 when the Wellcome Library embarked on a project with the Internet Archive to digitise their collection of 19th-century medical books. The project was extended earlier in 2014 with the support of Jisc and the Higher Education Funding Council for England. It was co-designed with Research Libraries UK and is informed by an Academic Advisory Group to ensure that the best collections are included. 

For the Wellcome Library this forms part of a larger ambition to digitise and make freely available over 50 million pages of historical medical books, archives, manuscripts and journals by 2020.

More at the Wellcome Library website.

AAHM Workshop, Negotiating Access to Patient Related Materials: A Conversation between Archivists and Historians, Highlights Researcher Needs

  By

On Saturday, May 10, 2014 members of the Private Practices, Public Health project team hosted a lunch session at the 2014 annual meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine in Chicago. The session, Negotiating Access to Patient Related Materials: A Conversation between Archivists and Historians, represents efforts by the Medical Heritage Library, Harvard Medical School, and Johns Hopkins University to develop best practices for archivists to speed access to patient-related and patient-generated records that are informed by the working realities of researchers and historians. keys

Session panelists included Phoebe Evans Letocha, Collections Management Archivist, Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives at Johns Hopkins, who provided attendees with an overview of HIPAA and what has changed as a result of 2013 revisions to the Privacy Rule; historians Janet Golden, Rutgers University, and Cynthia Connolly, University of Pennsylvania, who shared with the audience their research experiences and difficulties using patient records to inform their research; and Emily R. Novak Gustainis, Head, Collections Services, Center for the History of Medicine, who presented on findings for the survey, Research Access to Protected Records Containing Health Information About Individuals, which sought to elicit information from researchers about what they want from descriptive guides to historical collections containing patient information. The session was moderated by Scott Podolsky, Director of the Center for the History of Medicine and newly elected AAHM Councilor.

Session participants generated a number of points for archivists to consider, including:

  • Opening up communications with institutional compliance officers to develop best practices for assessing the “real” risk using patient records for historical research presents to institutions
  • Developing better ways to communicate to institutional review boards (IRBs) that historians do not want to distribute research unethically
  • Forging a partnership between the American Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM), the Society of American Archivists (SAA), and a professional legal organization to help explain the different access laws to both archivists and researchers state by state and to help advocate for a more consistent researcher experience through more uniform laws
  •  Crowd-sourcing information on collections with restricted content through researcher participation to help future historians understand whether or not they should pursue an IRB

Feedback from the session will also be incorporated in to Gustainis and Letocha’s presentations at the August 2014 meeting of the Society for American Archivists as part of the session, Partners in Practice: Archivists and Researchers Collaboratively Improving Access to Health Collections.

The MHL Welcomes a New Content Contributor: University of Toronto Dentistry Library

  By

379 items from the University of Toronto H.R. Abbot Memorial Library and Dentistry Library have been added to the Medical Heritage Library.

The collection includes items such as Dentistry in the Bible and Talmud, The Teeth, and a large number of periodicals, including Oral Health  and The Dental Advertiser.

The Dentistry Library is formally known as the H.R. Abbott Memorial Library and the Dentistry Library, University of Toronto (UofT). The Memorial library was established in 1924, upon the death of Dr. Abbott’s sister, whose will provided for the establishment and maintenance of a dental library with a trust fund to be administered by the Royal College of Dentists of Ontario. The Dentistry Library was informally established in the late 1880s to support the curriculum needs of the students and faculty. It includes dental and some basic sciences titles. Currently, includes over 30,000 print monographs and periodicals, in addition to the rich health sciences electronic resources available of UofT Libraries.

The Medical Heritage Library (MHL) is a content centered digital community supporting research, education, and dialog that enables the history of medicine to contribute to a deeper understanding of human health and society. It serves as the point of access to a valuable body of quality curated digital materials and to the broader digital and nondigital holdings of its members. It was established in 2010 with funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation via the Open Knowledge Common to digitize 30,000 medical rare books. MHL principal contributors are The Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard University, the National Library of Medicine, the New York Academy of Medicine, the Welch Medical Library, Library of the Institute of the History of Medicine, and the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, and the Wellcome Library. The MHL also includes content contributions from Duke University, University of Massachusetts Medical School’s Lamar Soutter Library, and the Gerstein Science Information Centre, University of Toronto among others.

The MHL Welcomes New Content Contributor: The University of Illinois Chicago Library of the Health Sciences

  By

The University of Illinois Chicago recently added 16 items to the Medical Heritage Library’s collection. The titles include Plexus, the official publication of the College of Physicians and Surgeons in the Medical Department of the University of Illinois at the end of the 19th century. Other titles include The Swedish Covenant Hospital and Home of Mercy, and the Medical and dental colleges of the west : historical and biographical: Chicago as edited by H.G. Cutler in 1896, a valuable resource for those interested in 19th century medical education and services in the Chicago area.

The Special Collections and University Archives Department at the Richard J. Daley Library houses collections of rare books, manuscripts, maps and photographs, with particular strength in the social, political and cultural history of Chicago. The collections at the Library of the Health Sciences-Chicago document Chicago’s rich history as a center for the education and practice of the medical arts.

The Medical Heritage Library (MHL) is a content centered digital community supporting research, education, and dialog that enables the history of medicine to contribute to a deeper understanding of human health and society. It serves as the point of access to a valuable body of quality curated digital materials and to the broader digital and nondigital holdings of its members. It was established in 2010 with funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation via the Open Knowledge Common to digitize 30,000 medical rare books. MHL principal contributors are The Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard University, the National Library of Medicine, the New York Academy of Medicine, the Welch Medical Library, Library of the Institute of the History of Medicine, and the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, and the Wellcome Library. The MHL also includes content contributions from Duke University, University of Massachusetts Medical School’s Lamar Soutter Library, and the Gerstein Science Information Centre, University of Toronto among others.

BUMED’s historians upload 2000th item to Medical Heritage Library

  By

After slightly more than a year of uploading material to the Medical Heritage Library, the US Navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery’s 2000th item appeared online today (May 19). A Series of Reports to the Nursing Division of the activities of the Nurse Corps Officers serving aboard the U.S. Naval Hospital in the Repose is now easily available for research. The reports from CDRs Angelica Vitillo and M.T. Kovacevich back to Captain Ruth Erickson, Director of the Navy Nurse Corps, and her successor CAPT Veronica Bulshefski date from 8 November 1965 to 2 December 1966. They are in turns informative, chatty and sad.

” Our first direct casualty which arrived Saturday, the nineteenth, was a nineteen year old bilateral mid-thigh amputee who to date has received over 45 pints of blood.” (28 February 1966)

” The improvements we have initiated in our individual staterooms have contributed to maintaining a high state of moral among the nurses, One of the base shops at Hunters Point allowed us to misappropriate an assortment of very colorful and feminine looking bedspreads for our rooms.” (13 December 1965)

“Death claimed the life of a very young man who had extensive chest wounds on Monday, the seventh and a thirty three year old arm amputee with other extensive wounds on Tuesday the eighth. Some of our young nurses are feeling these losses acutely.” (9 March 1966)

These letters join a soon-to-be complete set of over 1000 issues of 70 years of Navy Medicine magazine; oral histories with veterans of World War 2, Korea and Vietnam; a growing collection of audiovisuals including one on the Navy’s humanitarian efforts after the Vietnam War; and many other items.

A small selection of our photographs may  be found on Flickr at https://www.flickr.com/photos/navymedicine/.

Have You Tried It Yet?

  By

 

search toolGrab your research plans and check out our full-text search tool!

You can use the tool to search for exact phrases (“cold bath”), to search within fields (title:”cold bath”), or to look for a date range (“cold bath” date:[1870-1890]). You can also drop in keywords (“hypnotism,” “new thought,” “family medicine”) to get a sense of the range of items available in the MHL on a particular topic.

If you’re using the search tool for your research — be it a term paper, a book proposal, or a blog post — please let us know!

And as always, you can find more from the Medical Heritage Library in our full collection!

New to the MHL!

  By

Check out these items recently uploaded to the MHL:

And as always for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!