Category: News

Fellowships Now Accepting Applications

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Our partners at the Center for the History of Medicine are currently accepting applications for two separate fellowships. Following posts are courtesy Jessica Murphy, Public Services Librarian at the Center.

Since 2003, the Boston Medical Library (BML) in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine has sponsored annual fellowships supporting research in the history of medicine using Center for the History of Medicine collections. BML Fellowships in the History of Medicine at the Countway provide stipends of up to $5,000 to support travel, lodging, and incidental expenses for a flexible period between July 1, 2020 and June 30, 2021. Besides conducting research, the fellow will submit a report on the results of his/her residency and may be asked to present a seminar or lecture at the Countway Library.

The collections of the Center for the History of Medicine enable researchers to contextualize, understand, and contribute to the history of human health care, scientific medical development, and public health; they reflect nearly every medical and public health discipline, including anatomy, anesthesiology, cardiology, dentistry, internal medicine, medical jurisprudence, neurology, obstetrics and gynecology, pharmacy and pharmacology, psychiatry and psychology, and surgery, as well as variety of popular medicine topics and public health subjects such as industrial hygiene, nutrition, and tropical medicine. The Center serves as the institutional archives for the Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Dental Medicine, and the Harvard School of Public Health, and is home to the Warren Anatomical Museum, which includes anatomical artifacts, pathological specimens, instruments, and other objects. Through the Center, researchers have the opportunity to use the rich historical resources of both the Harvard Medical Library and Boston Medical Library.

Fellowship proposals (no more than 5 pages) should describe the research project and demonstrate that the Countway Library has resources central to the research topic.
Applications should include:
• CV
• Length of visit
• Proposed budget and budget breakdown (travel, lodging, incidentals)
• Two letters of recommendation are also required

Electronic submissions of materials may be sent to: chm@hms.harvard.edu

Boston Medical Library Fellowships
Center for the History of Medicine
Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine
10 Shattuck Street
Boston, MA 02115.

Application deadline is Friday, February 14th.

Please see our website for more information and details about previous research recipients. Awards will be announced in early April.

and

The New England Regional Fellowship Consortium (NERFC) is now accepting applications for 2020-2021 research grants.

This collaboration of thirty major cultural agencies will offer at least twenty awards in 2020–2021. Each grant provides a stipend of $5,000 for a minimum of eight weeks of research at three or more participating institutions beginning June 1, 2020, and ending May 31, 2021. The Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine and its Center for the History of Medicine is a NERFC member. Visit the NERFC website for more information and list of participating institutions.

Special award in 2020–2021: The Colonial Society of Massachusetts will underwrite a project on the history of New England before the American Revolution.

Application Process: All applications must be completed using the online form.

Deadline: February 1, 2020

Questions: Contact the Massachusetts Historical Society:
Phone at 617-646-0577 or Email fellowships@masshist.org

Fun with Images

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We’re preparing our first ever annual report for the MHL, Inc. and I’ve been spending some time finding and editing images. I’ve always liked the look of page collages so I’ve been playing around seeing what I can make up using pages from our most downloaded volumes.

Stay tuned for the report itself!

UCSF Archives & Special Collections Artist in Residence

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~This post courtesy Polina Ilieva, Archivist, UCSF Library & Special Collections.

The UCSF Library Archives and Special Collections and the Makers Lab are piloting a one year artist-in-residence program. The UCSF Library Artist in Residence award, valued at $6,000, will be given annually to one candidate with a degree in Studio Arts or a related field and/or a history of exhibiting artistic work in professional venues.

The goal of this program is to promote health humanities by exposing and re-purposing historical materials preserved in the Archives and Special Collections. Through the collaboration with the Makers Lab, the artist will create works that explore connections between art and healing, examine the process of scientific discovery, address contemporary issues related to health care and social justice, or historical subjects in health sciences that are inspired by the Archives and Special Collections holdings including rare books, personal papers, photographs, artifacts, university publications, East Asian and Art collections. Possible projects can include, but are not limited to: painting; photography; performance; sculpture; 3D scanning and 3D printing; programmable electronics; and digital, video or installation art.

The recipient, who will be known as the UCSF Library Artist in Residence, will receive assistance from the staff of the UCSF Library and will have full access to the Library’s Archives and Special Collections and Makers Lab equipment. Please note that the artist will be accommodated as well as possible, but that there is no dedicated studio space available. The award is intended to cover travel, materials, and related expenses incurred by the artist; the amount given is set at $6,000, from which taxes may be deducted, and will be paid upon completion of the residency requirements.

The Artist in Residence will:

  1. Complete at least one project
  2. Curate exhibit on work done during residency
  3. Teach quarterly classes in Makers Lab and/or Archives (no credit and open to public)
  4. Post regular updates on Library news and social media channels
  5. Submit a final narrative report to be published on Archives news

The work done during the residency will become property of UCSF. UCSF will recognize the artist for all work done.

Application period open through January 10, 2020.

Questions? Contact Polina Ilieva. Download and share the Artist in Residence flyer to help us spread the word!

Ready to Apply?

Interested artists should submit the following information as a single PDF file with the filename (your-last-name-UCSF-artist-2020.pdf)

  • One page project proposal that addresses:
    • The conceptual approach of the project
    • Aspects of the collection that are of interest
    • How you would engage the public
  • One-year proposed timeline
  • Your CV
  • Two letters of recommendation
  • List of up to six past work samples that includes title, image of project, location, date completed, media, brief description of the project/conceptual information, and budget (if applicable)

Go here to submit your application!

We’re Nearly There!

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Our new website just needs the last few polishing touches before we give a grand tour! We’ve made lots of changes and we’re very excited.

In the meantime, if you come across a link that doesn’t link or an email that doesn’t email, please do tell us: @medicalheritage (Twitter) or medicalheritage @ gmail . com!

From Our Partners: Fee Reduction for “Memory Lives On” Event

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~This post courtesy Polina Ilieva, Archivist, UCSF Archives and Special Collections.

We posted a couple of weeks back about the “Memory Lives On” event upcoming at the UCSF Archives and Special Collections and we have a great announcement from Polina Ilieva:

Dear Colleagues,

Please be advised that due to recent gifts from our supporters, we are now able to lower the symposium registration fee to $30 to allow a broader audience of students and community members to attend our event.

If you have already signed up for the event and paid the higher fee, the difference will be refunded to you.

News from Our Partners: Warren Anatomical Museum Exhibition Gallery Now Closed Until Spring 2021

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~Post courtesy Dominic Hall, Warren Anatomical Museum curator.

As of Wednesday, 8/21/2019, the Warren Anatomical Museum exhibition gallery will be closed until Spring 2021 to prepare for its redesign as part of the larger renovation of the Countway Library of Medicine. Throughout August, the exhibits will be taken down both for their protection during the upcoming construction and to allow for the curation of the next iteration of the Warren Anatomical Museum exhibition gallery.

Keep an eye out on the Center for the History Medicine news feed and the Countway Library website for updates on the renovation and ways you can give input on the next Warren Anatomical Museum gallery.

A New Look!

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We’ve been working on a new look for the website all summer and we’re just about ready to roll it out. All our URLs are going to stay the same, as will all our social media accounts, so you don’t need to worry about updating anything or changing any bookmarks.

We’re going to be rolling out the changes over the next two weeks, starting with the small stuff and working up to a full redesign of our front page which we’re very excited about!

So we ask you to bear with our dust as we work out the kinks of taking our new design live. If anything seems seriously out of order, though, please don’t hesitate to be in touch: medicalheritage (at) gmail (dot) com. And thanks in advance for your patience!

From Our Partners: Journals Digitisation at the Wellcome Collection

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~This post courtesy Paul Horn, Digitisation Support Officer, Wellcome Collection.

We are at the beginning of a project to digitise Wellcome’s collections of journals – the periodical publications of a range of societies, organisations, and academic disciplines concerned with health.  The project is exciting because of its scale, the new challenges it presents, and the benefits it will offer to researchers and other users.

The journal holdings are substantial and are representative of Wellcome’s wide-ranging and unusual collection.  Whilst some have a narrow focus on a geographic region and/or special interest, such as the Annual report and transactions of the Plymouth Institution and Devon and Cornwall Natural History Society, others are overtly miscellanies.  The Gentleman’s Magazine (first published in 1731) pioneered such an approach: its emphasis was to create a monthly digest of news, commentary and satire for the educated public.

Contributions to that magazine take the form of letters to the editor, Sylvanus Urban (the pen name of its founder, Edward Cave), and range in one volume (selected at random) for 1790, from a consideration of ‘The Celibacy of Fellowes of Colleges’, to remarks on Jamaican vegetable soap from a correspondent in Bermuda, and an illustrated account of a new apparatus ‘for communicating Heat to Bodies apparently dead.’  Debates carried out through its letters could run for several issues.  It was the first periodical to use the term magazine (from the French, meaning ‘storehouse’), and utilised a vast distribution system, established by Cave, being read throughout the English-speaking world.

For now, we are focussing only on digitising runs of journals which start and end before the beginning of the twentieth century.  Based on the average page count per item, average number of items per serial, and the in-scope to out-of-scope ratio of the material we have assessed so far, we expect the journals currently selected for digitisation to take around a calendar year to photograph, accounting for 4 million individual images.  The remainder of titles that begin before 1900 but continue into the twentieth century, and those that begin and end after 1900 would, if we were to digitise them, take almost 7 years to produce nearly 30 million more images.

The journals digitisation project follows on from our work with the Internet Archive to digitise our nineteenth century books collection, which concluded this spring after four years spent preparing, photographing and ingesting 12 million images from 35,000 monographs charting the history of medicine.  Whilst the journals share physical characteristics with these books, they differ in ways which present new challenges. Different categories of metadata pertain to them, and the library only holds a single serial level catalogue record for each of the publications we are digitising.  Therefore, it is necessary for us, when assessing the material, to decide whether the journal divides most naturally into volumes or issues, and then, using the serial records as templates, to create new records in our digitisation database for each new item, adding volume, issue, edition, and date information.  The level of existing metadata is not consistent from one serial to another, so we must maintain attention to detail.  The journals are a large collection with limited catalogue information.  Therefore, forecasting the duration of the project and refining the schedule is an ongoing process.  Creating new records with enhanced metadata not only facilitates scheduling but enables us to develop a more detailed picture of Wellcome’s own holdings.

Together with the Internet Archive, whose staff photograph the journals in a dedicated studio on-site at Wellcome, we have worked towards an easily searchable and browsable way to display the digitised journals on their website.  Included as part of the ‘scan list’ we send to the Internet Archive when delivering each batch of journals are composite titles for each item automatically generated from the metadata concerning the journal name, date range, volume, issue and edition.  These descriptive titles replace the simpler serial titles in Wellcome’s catalogue when the Internet Archive pull the records for ingest, and are displayed on the Internet Archive site as the main heading for each item.  The journals are collected and searchable as part of the main MHL collection at http://www.archive.org/details/medicalheritagelibrary.  When we have the capability to do so, they will be displayed on Wellcome’s own site, too.

The journals project has the potential to provide an excellent resource for researchers and other users.  Journals lend themselves to fruitful speculative keyword searches which can reveal interesting and unexpected connections, including the juxtaposition of articles with pictorial content such as adverts.  They also attract browsing more than other forms – researchers will want to flick through titles to see what changes from volume to volume, month to month, week to week, etc. 

As our journals become available online, a more detailed picture of the varied nature of science writing across history will emerge, and researchers will be able to use the breadth of collection to situate material in its cultural context.

NLM and Medical Heritage Library to Expand Public Access to Collections

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The National Library of Medicine (NLM) signed a three-year memorandum of understanding with the Medical Heritage Library (MHL) to promote free and open access to quality historical resources in medicine and the human health sciences.

Under the agreement, the MHL will include digitized NLM historical materials and associated metadata in its free and open archive of historical resources. Additionally, staff of the organizations will exchange expertise to ensure and share accurate metadata for the materials, data-driven analyses of usage of the materials, as well as transparent and open engagement efforts with researchers who could benefit from knowing about the free availability of the materials.

MHL—a nonprofit organization—is a digital curation collaborative among some of the world’s leading medical libraries promoting free and open access to quality historical resources in medicine.   Through the partnership with the MHL, the NLM strengthens its connections to U.S. and international peer institutions and their communities, including Harvard University, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the New York Academy of Medicine, the Wellcome Library in London and the Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de Santé in Paris.

NLM holds collections spanning ten centuries of global medical history. “This agreement supports the shared goals of NLM and MHL to open these collections to new audiences and provide access that supports a variety of current and developing research methods,” said Jeffrey S. Reznick, PhD, Chief of the NLM History of Medicine Division.

“This agreement with the NLM strengthens the MHL’s core mission, as a collaborative digitization and discovery organization committed to providing open access resources in the history of healthcare and the health sciences,” said Melissa Grafe, PhD, President of the Medical Heritage Library and Head of the Medical Historical Library at Yale. “Since 2010, the NLM’s world-renowned collections have been—and with this memorandum of understanding will continue to be—a core part of the nearly 300,000 freely and openly available digitized items in the Medical Heritage Library, used in research and education throughout the world.”

Since its founding in 1836, the National Library of Medicine https://www.nlm.nih.gov has played a pivotal role in translating biomedical research into practice and is a leader in information innovation. NLM is the world’s largest medical library, and millions of scientists, health professionals and the public around the world use NLM services every day.

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