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!
The secrets of the invisible world disclos'd ... by Andrew Moreton, a.k.a. Daniel Defoe is one of the many early works dealing with interactions between the spirit and material worlds in the collections digitized so far.
The Center for the History of Medicine is happy to report that we recently contributed our one-millionth page of content to the Medical Heritage Library. Beyond the simple fact of that number, which represents a fraction of our eventual contributions to the project, a million pages of digitized content means that local patrons and MHL users around the world now have free and open access to over 3,000 rare and historically-significant medical texts previously available only to members of the Harvard community and visiting researchers. Users can now download full-color, high-resolution page images of medical charts, photographic plates, engravings, maps, atlases and a wide variety of other types of content from the book collections at the Countway Library, including, of course, hundreds of thousands of pages of printed text published between the 16th and 20th centuries (all of which are fully keyword-searchable).
Subject areas covered in our contributions thus far include: Military medicine, General surgery and surgical history, Spiritualism,Sanitation, Hygiene, Tropical medicine, Medical jurisprudence,Psychology, Gynecology, Phrenology, Crimes, criminology,Electrotherapeutics, Climatology, and Homeopathy, among others.
As we pass the one-million mark, it is important to note that statistics regarding the progress of our contributions to the MHL are not the only cause for celebration. More importantly to all of us here at the Center, the 3,000+ books that we have digitized so far have already been downloaded over 35,000 times, a number that helps to illustrate both a significant demand for these materials and the perceived utility of their digitized copies to those users who seek them out.
In the coming year we intend to triple the number of items digitized thus far, and in so doing to assure that these materials are available to the public on-line and in perpetuity. The work to come remains considerable–each individual book needs to be reviewed, selected, cataloged, digitized, and finally checked for quality before returning to our stacks. But the numbers we have gathered from our users up until this point one thing clear: it’s worth the effort!
For more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!
(Cross-posted from the Center for the History of Medicine blog.)
