Category: News

MHL Awarded NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant

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The Medical Heritage Library (MHL) has received a Level-One Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. This grant will support planning activities among 10 institutions and a scholarly advisory committee to continue developing the MHL (www.medicalheritage.org). The project furthers the MHL’s mission 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 understanding of the world in which we live.” This groundbreaking partnership in the digital humanities will highlight unique research resources in the history of medicine held by these institutions and enhance their utility for research.

“At the most basic level of full-text searching, digitization enables scholarship that simply could not be performed otherwise,” says Scott H. Podolsky, M.D., Director of the Center for the History of Medicine, Countway Library, and Assistant Professor of Global Health and Social  Medicine, Harvard Medical School. “Using runs of historical journals that are fully digitized, for example, it is possible to study the development of randomized controlled trials by performing full-text searches for such terms as ‘alternate patient(s)’ or ‘alternate case(s).’ The possibilities for answering novel questions are seemingly endless, and limited chiefly by the texts that have been digitized, the metadata applied to them, and the accessibility of the resources to scholars. NEH support will help erase these limitations.”

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. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at: www.neh.gov.

CLIR 2011 Sponsors’ Symposium Features the Medical Heritage Library

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The world of higher education at large continues to grapple with the changing needs of researchers brought about by emerging technologies. Although many of the technological solutions for building a more robust research infrastructure are within our grasp, the human side of this equation is unresolved. That is, we are still learning the productive ways in which to work together across professional and institutional boundaries. This was a focus of discussion at the 2011 Council on Libraries and Information Resources Sponsors’ Symposium in Arlington, VA—Collaborative Opportunities Amidst Economic Pressures. Lively discussion of the economic, institutional, and social factors that can facilitate or impede collaborative solutions filled much of the day.

My presentation, Whose Goals are They? Navigating Diverse Institutional Cultures and Shared Responsibility for Creating Digital Resources in the History of Medicine, focused on the history of the MHL project and how a diverse group of partners can support digital scholarship in the medical humanities. This presentation was part of a panel that included two other examples of successful collaborations:

  • “The Making of Hydra: Common Solutions for Common Problems” by Martha Sites, Associate University Librarian for Production and Technology Services, University of Virginia
  • “TextGrid: A Virtual Research Environment for the Humanities” by Heike Neuroth, Scientific Coodinator of TextGrid and Director of Research and Development, University Library of Goettingen.

Together these projects highlight three approaches to finding shared solutions for disciplinary or local issues. In the final session of the day Chuck Henry, CLIR President, divided us into groups and asked the provocative question: What is it about our policies, organizations, traditions, or practices that impedes collaboration? The list of responses ranged from resource and staffing constraints to the perhaps more challenging habits of culture and communication.

PowerPoint slides from each of the presentations are available here. CLIR will also post a summary of the afternoon session on their website with a blog or wiki to encourage wider discussion. Visit often and join in the conversation.

Lori M. Jahnke
S. Gordon Castigliano CLIR Fellow
The College of Physicians of Philadelphia

Institutional Digitization Survey Results

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In November and December, 2010, the MHL asked repositories holding medical heritage materials to respond to a survey regarding their past experiences and future digitization plans. Summary analysis of survey results can be found here: MHL Institutional Digitization Survey.

The MHL will be pursuing additional information regarding digitization plans and practices. If your repository has not completed the survey and would like to participate, please contact: medicalheritage@gmail.com.

How Digital Resources Can Support Your Scholarship or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Digital World

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Photograph from "Making the Most of Life"

Photograph from "Making the Most of Life." Digitized for the Medical Heritage Library from the collections of the Columbia University Health Sciences Library.

Going to Philadelphia in April for AAHM?

If you’re attending the American Association for the History of Medicine annual meeting, join curators and reference librarians from leading academic medical libraries for lunch on Saturday. These subject specialists will discuss the digital resources, websites and databases, they consult when responding to research questions.  Among the sources under discussion will be the Medical Heritage Library.

This will also be an opportunity to learn about digital scholarship in the history of medicine itself and discuss the creative use of emerging resources. 

The lunch talk features:

Stephen Novak, Head, Archives and Special Collections, Columbia University Medical Center;

Michael North, Head of the Rare Books & Early Manuscripts Section in the History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine;

Jack Eckert, Public Services Librarian, Center for the History of Medicine, Countway Medical Library;

Lori Jahnke, S. Gordon Castigliano CLIR Fellow, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia;

Jeremy Greene, Assistant Professor of the History of Science, Harvard University.

For more information about the AAHM meeting program, look here. We hope to see you on April 30 at session L3: How Digital Resources Can Support Your Scholarship.

Find Making the Most of Life at http://www.medicalheritage.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/makingmostoflife00oshe_0018.jpg). View all our collections at http://www.archive.org/details/medicalheritagelibrary.

Open Knowledge Commons Founder Maura Marx Honored by Simmons GSLIS

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The MHL partners are pleased to announce that Maura Marx, CEO of the Open Knowledge Commons (OKC), has been honored with the GSLIS Alumni Achievement Award, presented annually by the Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science. Award winners have “demonstrated excellence in a way that exceeds the boundaries of their current positions by achieving influence as an outstanding role model for library and information science professionals.”

Ms. Marx initiated the Boston Public Library’s digital services program. Through the OKC, she catalyzed the MHL’s digitization project, now starting its second year. Ms. Marx is currently a fellow at the Berkman Center of Harvard University where her current project, developing a dialog around a digital public library, is drawing national attention.

We are proud to be associated with Ms. Marx and OKC and look forward to the exciting years ahead!

The Incredible, Embeddable Book

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At the end of 2010, the team at the Internet Archive premiered a new BookReader. The new Reader has several nice new features, including a ReadAloud option, improved shareability, and a wider range of navigation options.

The new BookReader can also be used to embed books in websites like this one!

The embeddable BookReader allows for full use of scanned texts on other webpages: you can flip back and forth between pages and move between embedded and full screen views. Going to full screen takes you back to the Internet Archive page for the book, letting you use the ReadAloud and zoom options.

All you have to do to get your own embedded book is click on the “Share This Book” icon (the purple circle) in the top right-hand corner of the Internet Archive display for any text.

Click the purple circle and embed!

Then you can embed your new book anywhere you’d like other people to see it. The Archive’s only caveat is that they haven’t successfully tested the coding on WordPress.com blogs yet.

In creating this post, we found the best technique was to embed the code in the HTML view of our blogging platform and then save the post as a draft; the embedded book then became “live” code and we could continue editing our post as usual. If you want to change the height or width of the book on your website, you can do that easily by editing the pixel numbers in the code (width=’480px’ height=’430px’) generated by the Internet Archive when you click “Share This Book.”

Talk to Us!

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We would love to know what you think of the Medical Heritage Library: how did you find us? What do you do with the material we have available? Is there anything you wanted to find and didn’t?

So we’ve put together a brief — eight question — user survey. Please help us out and give us your feedback!

Either click on the link above or go to the Talk to Us! page on the navigation bar at the top of the blog. Thanks!

Downloads on the Rise

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As of March 4, 2011, there were 3,326 items from the Francis A. Countway Library digitized and available for download from the Medical Heritage Library on the Internet Archive.

The obvious question is: are they being used?

A staff member decided to find out and discovered that in February alone, there were over 6,000 downloads of items from the Countway. And that was just one month. Overall, there have been more than 38,000 downloads of material from the Countway.

A download, in case you’re curious, is counted when a given user visits the page for a particular book (for example, Alfred Dale Covey’s 1911 The Secrets of Specialists) and actually clicks in to view the page or file. Just visiting the URL for the book doesn’t trip the Internet Archive’s download counter; neither does turning pages within a given book trip the counter.

This means that the material the MHL is busy putting out into the digital world is being sought out and used! We’re delighted that so many scholars are finding our material useful and we’re looking forward to making more items available in the coming months.

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

1,000,000 = 35,000

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Title page of Secrets of the Invisible World Disclosed...

The secrets of the invisible world disclos'd ... by Andrew Moreton, a.k.a. Daniel Defoe is one of the many early works dealing with interactions between the spirit and material worlds in the collections digitized so far.

The Center for the History of Medicine is happy to report that we recently contributed our one-millionth page of content to the Medical Heritage Library. Beyond the simple fact of that number, which represents a fraction of our eventual contributions to the project, a million pages of digitized content means that local patrons and MHL users around the world now have free and open access to over 3,000 rare and historically-significant medical texts previously available only to members of the Harvard community and visiting researchers. Users can now download full-color, high-resolution page images of medical charts, photographic plates, engravings, maps, atlases and a wide variety of other types of content from the book collections at the Countway Library, including, of course, hundreds of thousands of pages of printed text published between the 16th and 20th centuries (all of which are fully keyword-searchable).

Subject areas covered in our contributions thus far include: Military medicine, General surgery and surgical history, Spiritualism,Sanitation, Hygiene, Tropical medicine, Medical jurisprudence,Psychology, Gynecology, Phrenology, Crimes, criminology,Electrotherapeutics, Climatology, and Homeopathy, among others.

As we pass the one-million mark, it is important to note that statistics regarding the progress of our contributions to the MHL are not the only cause for celebration. More importantly to all of us here at the Center, the 3,000+ books that we have digitized so far have already been downloaded over 35,000 times, a number that helps to illustrate both a significant demand for these materials and the perceived utility of their digitized copies to those users who seek them out.

In the coming year we intend to triple the number of items digitized thus far, and in so doing to assure that these materials are available to the public on-line and in perpetuity. The work to come remains considerable–each individual book needs to be reviewed, selected, cataloged, digitized, and finally checked for quality before returning to our stacks. But the numbers we have gathered from our users up until this point one thing clear: it’s worth the effort!

For more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!

(Cross-posted from the Center for the History of Medicine blog.)

Discoveries in the Rare Book Stacks

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René Joseph Bertin's work on syphilis, the Traité de la maladie vénérienne (Paris, 1810) showing the armorial binding of the Emperor NapoleonResearchers from the Harvard-Longwood community and beyond benefit from the Medical Heritage Library, a growing collection of freely available digital texts.

Jack Eckert, Public Services Librarian, reports that, for the Center for the History of Medicine, one of the unintended benefits of the selection process for digitization is the unexpected discoveries made in the collection.  During a close and thorough examination each item considered for scanning, staff encounters and documents imperfections, incomplete sets, unrecorded titles bound with others, and corrects inaccurate cataloging information.  While this sort of information enhances the accuracy of the catalog, we are finding unexpected treasure as well. A large percentage of the rare book collection was acquired for its current informational value at the time, and little attention was paid to marks of ownership, provenance, and annotation.  But these are some of the very aspects that now enhance the rarity and value of the works.

For example, pioneer psychiatrist James Jackson Putnam (1846-1918) owned and donated a number of titles concerning the treatment of neuroses with electricity.  Many of our homeopathic titles were formerly part of the library of the Massachusetts Homeopathic Medical Society and contain inscriptions and annotations by local leaders in the movement, and physician Edward Jackson (1803-1884) was also clearly interested in homeopathy and owned a number of works on this subject.  A number of titles derive from the collection of the Boston Medical Library of 1805, and still more were part of the original library at Harvard Medical School and donated by James Jackson (1777-1867) and other members of the early faculty.  While Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s interest in the water-cure was known to scholars and historians, we were until recently unaware that several of our hydropathic titles were part of his own library.

Probably the most exciting discovery we’ve made in our own collection to date is a copy of René Joseph Bertin’s work on syphilis, the Traité de la maladie vénérienne (Paris, 1810) which has an armorial binding of the Emperor Napoleon.  The book was probably part of the collection of noted dermatologist Edward Wigglesworth (1804-1876), whose library was donated to the Boston Medical Library in 1897.

To see these and other titles digitized for the Medical Heritage Library, see http://www.archive.org/details/medicalheritagelibrary.

For more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!

(Cross-posted from the Center for the History of Medicine blog.)