Tag: use

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!

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!

The Incredible, Embeddable Book

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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.”

Digital Highlights: Who is Francesco Durante or, What Can We Learn from Download Statistics?

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Francesco Durante (1844-1934); frontispiece from vol. 1 of "Per il XXV Anno Dell'Insegnamento Chirurgico di Francesco Durante"

Internet Archive, where the Medical Heritage Library’s content now resides, has a neat feature that allows you to see what has been downloaded most often.  With almost 8,500 volumes digitized by February 1, 2011, I thought it would be interesting to see what content in MHL was being most heavily used.

The results are surprising.  Among the top ten most downloaded volumes are three Columbia University catalogues (numbers 2, 5, and 10); three anatomical works: John McGrath’s Surgical Anatomy and Operative Surgery (1902) in the number 3 spot; the 1913 US edition of Henry Gray’s classic Anatomy, Descriptive and Applied (number 6); and Florence Fenwick Miller’s colorful An Atlas of Anatomy or Pictures of the Human Body (1879) in the number 8 position.

But the number one most downloaded volume in the Medical Heritage Library — a whopping 420 times —  is a comparative rarity: volume 2 of Per il XXV Anno Dell’Insegnamento Chirurgico di Francesco Durante nell’Università di Roma. 28 Febbraio 1898, edited by Roberto Alessandri. The second most downloaded item — the aforementioned Columbia University catalogue — can only boast 274 downloads.

No doubt you’re thinking Who? History of medicine mavens — at least those in the US — don’t need to be abashed if they have never heard of Durante.  While he is little known outside neurosurgery circles in this country, Durante (1844-1934) was a pioneering surgeon, esteemed teacher, and leading political figure in his native Italy.

The child of parents of modest means (his father helped build the first road to their isolated Sicilian village), Durante received his medical degree from Naples, studied with Virchow in Berlin, Billroth in Vienna, and Lister in London before being called to teach at the University of Rome in 1872. Twelve years later, in June 1884, he was the first surgeon to successfully remove a cranial base meningioma, an operation that caused an international sensation.

His 25th anniversary as a teacher at the University of Rome in 1897 was commemorated by the publication of the hefty 3 volume festschrift recently digitized by the MHL.  It contains contributions from several dozen surgeons on a wide variety of surgical topics.  While most of the authors were Italian, Durante’s fame was enough to elicit contributions from Philadelphia surgeon W.W. Keen and the French neurosurgeon Auguste Broca.

Why volume 2 of this title should have been downloaded so frequently will remain a mystery, but surely its rarity outside Italy — OCLC locates only four copies of the set in North America and another in Paris — played a factor.  It shows that there is a need for electronic access to even the most seemingly esoteric publications.

For more of the Durante festschrift click here:  http://www.archive.org/details/perilxxvannodell02ales

For all the holdings in the Medical Heritage Library click here: http://www.archive.org/details/medicalheritagelibrary