On August 10th, 2011, MHL project members met at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia to discuss the future of the MHL project. This was the first meeting under our NEH Digital Humanities Startup Grant. Continue reading
If you happen to know that you’re looking for a title from a particular contributor to the MHL — or perhaps you want to restrict your search so that you only get results from a library close to you or one you are planning to visit in the future — there’s a way to do that! Continue reading
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!
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!
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!
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.
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.
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.”
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!
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!
