Category: Resources

Digital Connections: Trove

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Trove is a discovery project from the National Library of Australia, aggregating a wide variety of content all to do with Australian history. The Library itself describes Trove as “supports the discovery and annotation of items in Australian collections.  The term “Australian collections” encompasses libraries, archives, university repositories and major online collections such as biographical databases, digitised book collections and digitised newspaper collections.” Continue reading

Digitizing Dorothea Lynde Dix at the National Library of Medicine

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Portrait of Dorothea Lynde Dix, from NLM’s Images from the History of Medicine database.

Dorothea Lynde Dix (1802-1887) was one of the most influential lay social reformers to focus on the care and treatment of the mentally ill in 19th-century America. After starting a career as a school teacher in Massachusetts, Dix became aware of the abject conditions under which mentally ill persons in the state were held and treated: many of them kept restrained in dank prisons with little or no clothing, heat, or treatment. Campaigning first in Massachusetts and Rhode Island and then around the country, she approached numerous private donors, state legislatures and the US Congress to make funding available to build humane facilities for the mentally ill. Continue reading

Digital Connections: Old Bailey Online

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The Old Bailey Online may not seem like the most obvious resource for researchers interested in the history of medicine. According to the project’s mission statement, it “…makes available a fully searchable, digitised collection of all surviving editions of the Old Bailey Proceedings from 1674 to 1913, and of the Ordinary of Newgate’s [prison chaplain] Accounts between 1676 and 1772. It allows access to over 197,000 trials and biographical details of approximately 2,500 men and women executed at Tyburn, free of charge for non-commercial use.” The website also provides access to digital images of pages from the Proceedings and Ordinary’s Accounts. There’s an additional resource for those particularly interested in the accounts from the Newgate chaplain at the London Lives: Ordinary’s Accounts site, a sister project to the Old Bailey Online. Continue reading

Digital Connections: Embryo Encyclopedia

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In a new series on the MHL blog, I’m going to be putting together a semi-regular series on other collections and tools that you might find useful. If you think there’s something I missed — something that should have a home on our “Tools for Digital Research” page, maybe? — please let me know! The email is medicalheritage (one word) at gmail dot com.

This week, I want to point out the Embryo Project Encyclopedia. Continue reading

Resources

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Reading room of the Wellcome Library. (Photo by JL Phillips.)

Over the last couple of months, we’ve been working on a resource list for you here on the website. You can get to it by navigating to the “Tools for Digital Research” page on the navigation bar at the top of the page.

Lori Jahnke and I have been putting together a list of tools you can use to analyze text, take notes and organize your research, connect with other researchers, and, of course, check out more great online collections.

We’ve done our best to describe these links accurately and make sure they’re up-to-date, indicating which services require payment or purchase, what tools will allow you to do, and what sort of materials online collections might feature, for example. Continue reading

Historic New Orleans

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Via a recent posting to the Caduceus-L  listserv, we learn that the Rudolph Matas Library of Tulane University is announcing the opening of its online collection of New Orleans Charity Hospital Reports.  Available through the Internet Archive, the Rudolph Matas website, and LOUISiana Digital Library Collection of Collections, the collection of reports spans over 100 years from 1842 to 1974. Researchers can browse the reports online or download the reports in .pdf form from the Matas website or browse them at the Internet Archive. Continue reading

Searching the Archive (II)

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The last formal way of searching the Internet Archive, whether for content from the Medical Heritage Library or other collections, is via the advanced search function.

As you can see, advanced search allows you to construct quite a complex search. However, none of these fields are mandatory and you can enter as much or as little as you wish in any of them. You can select “contains” or “does not contain” from any of the relevant dropdown boxes to construct something like a Boolean search query. You can select custom fields in three fields to include a number of additional query terms:

The list goes on from here! The custom fields allow you to construct a highly specified search query, but you need to know a lot about your desired item in order to make them most useful.

Again, if you’re using this search function to track down a specific title in the MHL collection, the best way to go about it would be to enter what you know of the book you’re looking for — author, title, place of publication, year of publication, and so forth — and select the “American Libraries” collection. The more you know about the book, the more information you can enter into the search engine, and the more likely you are to find the requisite title quickly.

If you’re not trying to track down one particular book, however, this search function can be very helpful in returning lists of items for you to browse through: you can combine and recombine search terms, authors, titles, places, dates, and collections to create very specific lists of search results, using the functionality of the search engine to show you exactly the results you want.

For more tips on searching the MHL, check out our MHL @ Internet Archive page and as always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!

Searching the Archive (I)

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In our last post about searching, we talked about how to look through items specifically in the MHL collections and through the MHL’s Internet Archive website. But you might also be looking for items with, so to speak, a broader net and want to use the Archive’s larger search functions.

From the Archive’s main page, you can do a very general search in the box at the top of the page that will cover everything and anything in the Archive’s collections. This is a great way to find out what the Archive has on a given topic or person and it works well to generate a list of items you can browse through.

If something more directed is what you had in mind, you can select a specific collection from the dropdown box on the right:

This may be most helpful if you’re looking for a given title, author, person, or subject. Reading the background on the various collections might also be useful in giving you a better idea of where something is likely to be found; for information on the WayBack Machine, the Archive itself, and some of the Moving Image collections, check out the FAQ. For more on the text projects, including American Libraries and Canadian Libraries, have a look at the Welcome page. And for more on the audio projects housed by the Archive, including the Naropa Poetics Audio Archive and Librivox, check out the project page.

If you have a title you’re looking for from the MHL collections, for example, the fastest way to find it through the main-page search function is to type as much as you know of the title into the search box and select “American Libraries” from the dropdown.

If you know only part of the title, for example, “journal of the Harvard Medical School,” try placing it in quotations, exactly as it appears in this post. The quotation marks will tell the search engine to look for the words as a phrase, rather than as individual words.

For more tips on searching the MHL, check out our MHL @ Internet Archive page and as always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!