In recent weeks, you may have noticed that the comments on the blog have been a little strange. I have been trying different comment settings on this blog in an attempt to encourage as much potential for discussion on our posts as possible. Unfortunately, this has led to an avalanche of spam — as some of you have probably noticed if you noticed the comment totals and clicked through to view any of them! Continue reading
If you happen to have some free time on your hands this summer, why not consider entering the JISC Discovery Programme‘s Open Data Challenge?
The aim of the challenge is to use material from one of ten rich data-sets to create a software application which will allow users to discover “treasures” that might otherwise go missed in the mass of data. Entrants can draw upon data-sets from the British Library, the UK’s National Archives, circulation data from UK university libraries, and data from the Tyne and Wear Museums collections. Continue reading
In the July 2011 issue, Char Booth of the Library Journal interviews Heather Christenson and Paul Fogel from HathiTrust after starting to wonder where her pre-conceptions about digital libraries like Hathi came from.
In an announcement made earlier this month, the British Library and Google made public their joint agreement to allow the Google Books scanning service access to over 200,000 volumes from the British Library. This will encompass over 40 million pages of out-of-copyright material. While Google recently experienced a major setback to its scanning projects with the failure of the author settlement, the prospect of free access to some of the British Library’s unique materials is creating excitement in the digital libraries and digital humanities communities. Continue reading
From Anatomical Tables of the Human Body, William Cheselden, 1796.
From Practical horse farrier, or, The traveller's pocket companion: shewing the best method to preserve the horse in health...,William Carver, 1820.
The National Library of Medicine, the world’s largest medical library and a component of NIH, announces the release of Medicine in the Americas. A digital resource encompassing over 350 early American printed books, Medicine in the Americas makes freely available original works demonstrating the evolution of American medicine from colonial frontier outposts of the 17th century to research hospitals of the 20th century. Continue reading
I just ret
urned from the International Linked Open Data in Libraries Archives and Museums (LOD-LAM) Summit in San Francisco, CA . This was an intensive two-day conversation of what the internet could look like if libraries, archives, and museums unleashed their high quality metadata on the semantic web. How would the web differ from the way we know it today as primarily a tool for consumers?
The web as we know it now is built to display information that is easily interpreted by humans. The semantic web extends the human-readable world of web pages to the realm of machine-readable metadata allowing computers to process information more intelligently. In other words, the semantic web helps machines understand your data better and respond to complex requests based on human meaning. While we are still a long way from achieving this goal as Tim Berners-Lee envisioned it, the awareness that cultural memory organizations (e.g. libraries, archives, and museums) can play a pivotal role in transforming the consumer web to something far grander and more useful is slowly spreading.
The potential benefit to research is enormous. Imagine the rich catalog and finding aid data from each of the collaborating MHL institutions accessible in one place, linked to digitized content, as well as demographic, geographic, and other data sources. 100 digital archivists, librarians, scholars, publishers, and technologists converged on Japan town San Francisco last week to not only discuss this future, but to lay out a plan of action for building linked open data on the web. During these two days, I imagined wonderful things for the future of research as we discussed transforming hierarchies to open networks of information that could be manipulated and accessed in a variety of ways.
To catch a glimpse of what lies ahead for researchers, check out Mendeley–finally, a reference manager that can outsmart a TiVo. It is true, quite literally, that I saw the internet on Friday. I stood next to the servers of the Internet Archive. Perhaps it was the abundance of red bean paste I ingested after lunch, or the afternoon light streaming through the chapel windows of the former Christian Science Church, but I felt awed and humbled by the blinking lights as people from around the world accessed this incredible repository of human knowledge.
For more information on the summit and ongoing activity check out the LOD-LAM blog or the Google Group. Join the community and help us move linked data forward in the coming year.
Lori Jahnke
S. Gordon Castigliano CLIR Fellow
The College of Physicians of Philadelphia
The University of Michigan Library Copyright Office, in partnership with the HathiTrust Digital Library, is launching an effort to identify orphan works among the holdings of the HathiTrust.
Orphan works are those which are within their copyright date restrictions but for which no copyright holder can be found: effectively, they have no parent individual or organization and are, therefore, orphaned. Still, granting access to these works can be problematic since they are not outside the realm of copyright but, so to speak, mislaid within it.
The University of Michigan/Hathi identification project will start by focusing on works published between 1923 and 1963 and aims, in the end, to create tools which will allow publicizing of orphan work information, giving copyright holders the chance to come forward and claim their intellectual property.
Orphan works are a category of material which any digitization project must take into account: should they be digitized? if they are, should they be presented under the same rules as a work that is wholly out of copyright? should they be made available with restricted access of some kind? if restrictions are put on use, what should they be?
The list of questions is nearly endless and the MHL looks forward to the information that will undoubtedly be generated by the University of Michigan project.
Last week, Yale University, one of the partners in the MHL, announced it would be offering open access to images of many of the items in its museums, libraries, and special collections via a new website: Discover Yale Digital Commons.
Researchers can browse the collections — which include Historical Scientific Instruments — or search for something specific.
For more on the new Yale initiative, see coverage at DigitalKoans, Ten Thousand Year Blog, the Chronicle of Higher Education’s QuickWire or Boston.com.
The MHL is pleased to be in such a fine and growing group of online projects.
As always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!
Representatives of Medical Heritage Library (MHL) collaborating institutions presented a lunchtime session at the American Association for the History of Medicine annual meeting on Saturday, April 30th.
Michael North, National Library of Medicine (NLM), introduced the NLM’s improved Directory of History of Medicine Collections (http://www.cf.nlm.nih.gov/hmddirectory/index.cfm). The directory includes 200 repositories globally and is now searchable by subject and location. It is possible to refine searches, adding subjects or locations to assist users in prioritizing repositories to visit. He also demonstrated a new NLM resource, Digital Collections (http://collections.nlm.nih.gov), a repository for preservation and access to historical biomedical materials. Michael discussed one type of digital collection, 28 digitized films issued by the military during WWII, mostly related to hygiene, that have been transcribed so are fully searchable and accessible.
Stephen Novak, Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library, Columbia University, discussed Archive Grid (http://archivegrid.org/web/index.jsp), a portal to find archival collections held by thousands of repositories globally. Search results can be sorted by location, relevance, and repository. Links to finding aids appear in search results. Stephen noted that the NLM’s Finding Aids Consortium (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/consortium/index.html) provides access to a narrower—and highly relevant—body of finding aids drawn from twelve major history of medicine libraries.
Jack Eckert, Countway Library, discussed finding digitized books. In addition to commercial sources, there are a number of freely available collections of digitized books in the history of medicine. BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) (http://www.base-search.net/) offers open access web resources from 1700 repositories around the world. HATHI Trust (http://www.hathitrust.org/home) provides access to 8.6 million volumes with full text search; while only 27% of these are in the public domain, many more can be used for educational and research purposes. Google Books (http://books.google.com/) has an unfortunate user interface and scanning quality issues. It does provide deep searching across a wide variety of materials. Specialized sources include the Bibliothèque numérique Medica – Histoire de la santé at BIU Santé, Paris (http://www.bium.univ-paris5.fr/histmed/medica.htm), which covers science and medicine, and Taubman Medical Library’s Homeopathy Collection (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/h/homeop/). The Medical Heritage Library (http://www.archive.org/details/medicalheritagelibrary/) offers 9,000 medical rare books currently, with more coming. The online book reader provides tabbed access to search terms and a number of other functions. Books can be downloaded in a variety of formats.
Lori Jahnke, College of Physicians of Philadelphia, discussed the next steps for the MHL. In addition to digitizing new material, we are turning our attention to aggregating existing content and to developing an access environment that will facilitate cross-disciplinary study and digital scholarship in the history of medicine. Among our goals is linking primary sources with secondary literature, image repositories, film, and datasets. We plan to draw upon tools such as the Unified Medical Language System to improve the richness of content description, which will enable concept mapping as part of a more efficient discovery process. As the wealth of historical resources on the web grows so must our efforts in creating a coherent access environment that supports scholarly needs.
Jeremy Greene, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University, a member of the MHL’s scholarly advisory committee, opened the audience discussion by asking, how are we using digital resources, what do we need in terms of sources and tools, and how should the availability of these materials influence the training of new scholars? He described several ways in which digital sources are commonly employed: as a way to locate resources that are remote to the user, which are then printed; a convenient format to carry and use digital objects, which are downloaded, read, and annotated on the user’s computer; and as sources for objects that are downloaded then combined in single documents or databases for more powerful search and manipulation. These methods provide important efficiencies for scholars, but don’t use technology to extend the effectiveness of the scholar’s work. How can we get to the next level?
Audience members responded to the presentations and comments with a number of ideas about how digital resources and tools could be more useful. Some of these include:
– Projects tend to follow the subject strengths of collections. Scholars also want to cross-reference such holdings with materials in other formats and subjects.
– History of medicine should be presented in relation to social history, cultural history, and related fields.
– Projects need to be aware of other digital projects such as those undertaken by Google and others, leverage those projects, and demonstrate their value.
– Scholars need meta-tools for searching—not more silos. Will MHL bring materials together via a search tool?
– We need to bring the museum into the library – add artifacts and 3-D images to text repositories under single search tools.
– Lack of annotation is an obstacle for scholarly use of digital objects; what tools are available to support this activity?
– Who decides what gets digitized? Where do the resources come from?
– Scholars are accustomed to organizing paper files; what is the best way to organize the digital materials we download? What software can support organization?
We will be following up on the questions and ideas raised by participants. The MHL is committed to ongoing scholarly engagement to improve the library’s ability to support the work of students and scholars.
No, really, it's been a good year. Tractatus perutilis et completus de fractura cranei by Jacopo Berengario da Carpi, 1535. Digitized for the Medical Heritage LIbrary from the collections of the Countway Library of Medicine.
Over the past twelve months, the MHL has made progress on a number of fronts. As of this writing, 9,245 monographs have been uploaded to the Internet Archive (IA); nearly 5,000 more have been digitized and are awaiting processing and deposit. Subject areas include general public health topics, psychiatry, popular medicine, medical directories, forensic medicine, and therapeutics, as well as surgery, anatomy, and physiology. The ‘browse list’ of topics on the MHL’s IA homepage demonstrates the breadth of the history of medicine– it lists subjects from ‘Abattoirs’ to ‘Zulu War, 1879.’
MHL content has generated 187,000 downloads since the first deposit in early 2010. The single most downloaded book (currently at 702 downloads) is volume 2 of Per il XXV Anno Dell’Insegnamento Chirurgico di Francesco Durante nell’Università di Roma. 28 Febbraio 1898, edited by Roberto Alessandri (if the name Francesco Durante doesn’t ring a bell, see the MHL blog.
For more on our annual progress report, which will appear in the ALHHS Watermark, see: Announcements and Articles.
Your thoughts on any aspect of the MHL would be gratefully received; please email medicalheritage@gmail.com or leave a comment on our website or Facebook page.
