Category: Resources

Searching the MHL (I)

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There are several different ways you can access titles in the Medical Heritage Library through our Internet Archive website.

Our homepage features a variety of search functions: you can use the general Internet Archive search at the top of the page or you can browse the MHL’s collection by subject, author, or title.

If you choose to browse through the collection, you can either browse the whole collection, at once or you can go through by author, title, or subject. The subject browse shows a list of descriptive terms and the number of volumes that uses each term:

This list changes and updates constantly as volumes are added to our library and is always worth checking out to see what new and unusual topics we’re covering. It can also be helpful if you know what topic you want but do not have a specific title in mind. Click any topic link and you’ll get a list of the titles in that topic. You can click into any title that catches your eye or follow further keywords from titles with more than one.

For additional 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!

Digital Connections: The Otis Historical Archives

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You may be familiar with the photo hosting site Flickr for hosting or browsing travel, work, or personal photographs, but many archives and special collections repositories are using the service to draw attention to their collections.

In the field of medical history, for example, the Otis Historical Archives, part of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology’s National Museum of Health and Medicine, has put up hundreds of photographs, postcards, and cartoons.

The material includes photographs from the Civil War, World War I, World War II, and bodies such as United States Navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery. Also found here are topical collections such as Mirrors which collects 61 images of wounded patients posing to display their scars or injuries; in each case, a mirror is being used to point to some aspect of the wound that might not otherwise be noticed or readily seen by the viewer of the photograph. (For some interesting observations on the Mirrors set, check out this post from The Sterile Eye, a blog dedicated to medical photography.)

Highlights include of the Otis Archives material on Flickr:

General Pershing's dentures

World War II mess kit cleanliness poster

General Henry Barnum, gunshot wound

Colonel Frank Townsend examines the bullet that killed Lincoln and the probe used to examine the President

Thanks to Assistant Archivist Laura E. Cutter for sharing the great work of her repository with us!

Old Research Tools List

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This list of digital research tools has been superseded by the new Develop@MHL page! But since we know folks liked and used this page, we didn’t want it to vanish into thin air. So here it is!

Research Tools, Text Analysis, and Visualization

  • Diigo – Allows you to take notes, add virtual “sticky notes”, or highlight most Webpages.
  • Endnote (for purchase) – Citation tool.
  • github – A public code repository.
  • Google Scratchpad – Handy little free widget that lets you take notes and view them in a pop-out window, a browser window, or a Google Drive folder.
  • Omeka – Tool to create collections and present them online using free, open-source software.
  • Open Calais – Toolkit for semantic functionality within a blog, content management system, website, etc.
  • OpenLayers – Allows you to present geospatial information in a website.
  • Neatline – a set of Omeka plug-ins “for hand-crafted geo-temporal visualization and interpretation.”
  • Quick Note – Provides you with online scratchpaper; from Diigo.com. Also available for Firefox.
  • R (The R Project for Statistical Computing) – Statistical computing and graphics tools.
  • RapidMiner – Data mining and analysis tool.
  • Readability – Free app that lets you transform webpage text into a more readable format.
  • RefWorks (for purchase) – Online research management, writing, and citation tool.
  • TaPoR offers a variety of tools for text analysis and exploration.
    • Need help getting started on your text analysis? Check out the TaPoR recipes page.
  • TopBraid – Tools to help you model data and work with Semantic Web applications.
  • Visual Concept Explorer – Visually explore PubMed.
  • Visual Understanding Environment – Concept and content mapping.
  • Wandora – “General purpose information gathering, management, and publishing appplication.”
  • Zotero – Collection of tools to let you collect and organize your research.