Link Love from the Medical Heritage Library

NMHM, NCP 3280

For those of you who haven't heard, the Medical Heritage Library is a collaborative, digital curation project among some of the leading medical libraries, National Library of Medicine, The Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine (Harvard), The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library (Yale), The Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library (Columbia), and the New York Public Library. They "promote free and open access to quality historical resources in medicine."

A friend and colleague of mine works for the team at the MHL and we chat often about the unique world of medical archives. She gave us a shout-out today on their blog: Digital Connections: The Otis Historical Archives, highlighting some of her favorite images from the NMHM flickr site.

The Medical Heritage Library, an online resource

Here's almost 8500 historic medical texts available online for free:

The Medical Heritage Library (MHL) is a digital curation collaborative among some of the world's leading medical libraries. The MHL promotes free and open access to quality historical resources in medicine. Our goal is 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.

The Museum's got ~175 items at the Internet Archive (search for otishistoricalarchives) and when we figure out how to link them, we'll add them to this digital resource. Some of ours are unique, like the Pleasants Photograph Album, which is full of pictures of wounded soldiers who made the album as a 'thank you' for being tutored in reading.

Another Archives collection scanned

They are the cartes-de-visite of Medical Museum specimens. Labeled and arranged by specimen number, they were used as illustrations in the Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion (online and downloadable from the Internet Archive). Taken by museum photographers William Bell and E.J. Ward. There are a little over 700 of them.

Here's an example:

Woodcuts on the Internet Archive

I uploaded several curatorial logbooks to the Internet Archive this morning, among them one of woodcuts of surgical specimens used in Medical Museum publications. It's like a scrapbook, with the individual cuts clipped from larger sheets and pasted into this book. I think it's one of the more interesting logbooks in the collection.

Letter of the day, February 9 follow-up

What a coincidence. When the February 9 LOTD hit my inbox, I saw that it was written by H.C. Yarrow, whose manuscript "List of Skeletons and Crania in the Section of Comparative Anatomy of the United States Army Medical Museum" was uploaded just this morning to the Internet Archive. As of right now, the upload hasn't been processed by the Archive, but it should be available in a few hours. In the meantime, here's the first page:

"Red Cross Work on Mutilés at Paris - 1918"

We just uploaded this 1918 film to the Internet Archive. Everything says it uploaded fine, but as I can't actually view it from work, I'll have to take their word for it.

See it here.

Guide to Collections is now online

It was a long, hard haul, but the 2009 edition of the Guide to the Collections at the National Museum of Health and Medicine (the first update in 10 years) is now online at the Internet Archive. You can download the PDF here.

Applause, please.

Another item on the Internet Archive

We uploaded the August 1918 edition of the Carry On, a Red Cross publication about reconstruction and rehabilitation of World War 1 soldiers and sailors to the Internet Archive. See it here.

For some weird reason it's there twice although I uploaded it only once.

A Day in the Life....

Today was a really typical day with no excitement but a pretty good feeling of accomplishment at crossing things off my List. I basically worked on two things. The first was performing QA (quality assurance) on several curatorial log books that we've sent for scanning. Each one comes back in both JPG and PDF formats and I have to look at both for the QA. Not every single page, but enough to know the scans are up to snuff. You might wonder why I have to look at both formats. That's because when we first started scanning books the jpegs came back in whatever lovely color they actually had, but the PDFs inexplicably were in grayscale. I don't know that we ever figured out how or why, and they were fixed, but now I look at both. By the way, these books will eventually be uploaded to the Internet Archive. In my spare time.

The other project of the day had to do with a new book published by the Borden Institute, the publishing arm of the Army Medical Department and School. It's called War Surgery in Afghanistan and Iraq: a Series of Cases 2003-2007. We received a couple of discs of the pictures used in the book and while waiting for huge PDFs of the books I talked about above to load, I matched the loosely identified images from the discs to the ones in the book. I'm making a spreadsheet of captions for all of the pictures that will be uploaded, along with the images, into our (still internal) database as part of our Medical Illustration Service Library.

What I find compelling about this book, aside from the miracles the docs over there are working on our soldiers, is that it's fulfilling a mission much like the Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion did at the time of the Civil War; it's a valuable teaching tool. As Dr. David Lounsbury, one of the three authors, said in an interview with the International Herald Tribune, "The average Joe Surgeon, civilian or military, has never seen this stuff... "It's a shocking, heart-stopping, eye-opening kind of thing. And they need to see this on the plane before they get there, because there's a learning curve to this."

The project from the dark side

is finally done. What an extended, painful experience, getting the Gillette Receipt book photographed, photoshopped (oh, about 3 times) and pdf'ed. It's awaiting your viewing pleasure on the Internet Archive. Let's just say it was a learning experience.

Virtual museums

We came across a 2006 article from the NY Times yesterday that I thought vastly interesting, about how 75% of all visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art never cross the threshold. My first thought was "the admission fee!" but as you'll see, I misinterpreted this statement. I'm so used to free admission to great museums in Washington that I was taken aback on my first visit to the Met, seeing it was going to cost me $20 to get in. Worth it, of course, but a bit of culture shock (good pun, no?).

No, what the article meant was the Met has, as of 2006, 15 million visitors a year to its website, a huge number compared to the 4.5 million people who pay 20 bucks a pop. I understand the $20 is a suggested amount but, as one who works in a museum and has something of an understanding of what makes it go, I feel pretty guilty strolling in free.

It's this same kind of attempt to raise awareness of our museum that drives Mike and me and other staff to post samples of our stuff to our Flickr accounts (and hope, wish, hope for a Commons account), to the Internet Archive and to this blog. We have pretty cool things, just like the Met, that we want to share with everyone. No sense hiding our light under a basket, is there? We'd love to have the same kind of presence the Met has, and to see the same kind of numbers hitting our sites.

Internet Archive (archive.org)

As you know, we've been uploading books that we've digitized to the Internet Archive's collection of about 350,000 books. Today Wired.com had an article about the Archive, describing the page-by-tedious-page scanning that's being done there. It's nice to know that even the Big Boys are doing it a page at a time.