As you may have noticed if you visit our website regularly, we’ve made some changes to the look of the place.
At the minute, we’re still trying to get all the rough edges smoothed out: testing out color schemes, arrangement of widgets, and so forth.
We appreciate your patience while we work through to our final design choices — and if you see something you love or something you hate, please, tell us in the comments!
Thanks!
(Above) A collage of images from Countway books recently digitized and added to the MHL
This month, the Center for the History of Medicine contributed its two-millionth page-image to the Medical Heritage Library. That number translates into almost 6,000 volumes that have been digitized in their entirety (and downloaded over 90,000 times), or nearly two-thirds of our forecast total contributions to the project.
Those who are interested in the process of library digitization might also be interested to learn more about what those statistics mean in terms of logistics and workflow. What does it take to produce millions of page-images from a collection of hundreds of thousands of rare and fragile books? How much time is required? What are the biggest challenges involved? In this two-part series of blog posts, we will examine a large-scale digitization project from the inside. Continue reading
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
Welcome to the middle of the week! Here are some recent digital humanities news stories that have come across our feeds here at the MHL… Continue reading
In recent weeks, you may have noticed that the comments on the blog have been a little strange. I have been trying different comment settings on this blog in an attempt to encourage as much potential for discussion on our posts as possible. Unfortunately, this has led to an avalanche of spam — as some of you have probably noticed if you noticed the comment totals and clicked through to view any of them! Continue reading
In the July 2011 issue, Char Booth of the Library Journal interviews Heather Christenson and Paul Fogel from HathiTrust after starting to wonder where her pre-conceptions about digital libraries like Hathi came from.
In an announcement made earlier this month, the British Library and Google made public their joint agreement to allow the Google Books scanning service access to over 200,000 volumes from the British Library. This will encompass over 40 million pages of out-of-copyright material. While Google recently experienced a major setback to its scanning projects with the failure of the author settlement, the prospect of free access to some of the British Library’s unique materials is creating excitement in the digital libraries and digital humanities communities. Continue reading
From Anatomical Tables of the Human Body, William Cheselden, 1796.
From Practical horse farrier, or, The traveller's pocket companion: shewing the best method to preserve the horse in health...,William Carver, 1820.
The National Library of Medicine, the world’s largest medical library and a component of NIH, announces the release of Medicine in the Americas. A digital resource encompassing over 350 early American printed books, Medicine in the Americas makes freely available original works demonstrating the evolution of American medicine from colonial frontier outposts of the 17th century to research hospitals of the 20th century. Continue reading
The University of Michigan Library Copyright Office, in partnership with the HathiTrust Digital Library, is launching an effort to identify orphan works among the holdings of the HathiTrust.
Orphan works are those which are within their copyright date restrictions but for which no copyright holder can be found: effectively, they have no parent individual or organization and are, therefore, orphaned. Still, granting access to these works can be problematic since they are not outside the realm of copyright but, so to speak, mislaid within it.
The University of Michigan/Hathi identification project will start by focusing on works published between 1923 and 1963 and aims, in the end, to create tools which will allow publicizing of orphan work information, giving copyright holders the chance to come forward and claim their intellectual property.
Orphan works are a category of material which any digitization project must take into account: should they be digitized? if they are, should they be presented under the same rules as a work that is wholly out of copyright? should they be made available with restricted access of some kind? if restrictions are put on use, what should they be?
The list of questions is nearly endless and the MHL looks forward to the information that will undoubtedly be generated by the University of Michigan project.
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.
