Medical Heritage Library

The Medical Heritage Library (MHL), a digital curation collaborative among several medical libraries, is dedicated to promoting free and open access to quality historical resources in medicine. The MHL is currently digitizing books and journals and is working to expand to the digitization of archival materials, images, and other formats. In 2012, the MHL began digitizing 19th and early 20th century American medical journals [1].

The MHL works to:

Develop an organizational structure that will ensure sustainability of MHL activities
Increase institutional membership to ensure rich content contributions and international coverage
Seek and exploit collaborative opportunities with users, creators, contributors, and peer digital libraries that further the MHL’s work
Develop methodologies and projects that measure the impact and evaluate the benefits of the Medical Heritage Library to the communities it serves
Develop and promote tools to enhance discovery and use of content by exposing linkages among the content across partner repositories and across formats
Develop means to match archaic medical terminology to current terminology in order to expose the relevance of medical historical content to current medical practice, teaching, and research
Develop access and content management strategies that align with one or more existing large-scale digital projects such as HathiTrust, the Digital Public Library of America and the Biodiversity Heritage Library
Incorporate preservation as a requirement for future content development
Continue to improve access to the collection
Provide leadership regarding access and privacy issues unique to medical content in order to enable access in compliance with applicable ethical, legal, and regulatory codes

The MHL maintains a blog [2], Twitter account [3], and Facebook [4] page to interact with researchers, librarians, archivists, students, and the interested general public about the MHL collections, the history of medicine, digital humanities, and related topics.

The MHL began digitization of monographs in 2010 with an initial grant from the Sloan Foundation [5]. Work on the MHL project has continued with funding support from collaborating institutions, the National Endowment for the Humanities [6], and the Council on Library and Information Resources and the Mellon Foundation [7]. All digitized works are located at the Internet Archive [8].

The collection includes books, pamphlets, journals, and video and audio recordings in the history of medicine, including the health sciences (nursing, dentistry, audiology, physiology, psychology, psychiatry, biological science) and titles on spas, weather, veterinary medicine, gardening, physical culture, and alternative medicine. A working list of subject headings is available here. Titles have been chosen for their scholarly, educational, and research value. The MHL consults with a volunteer group of scholars in the history of medicine and related fields and surveys its users regularly. As of January 2013 the collection consisted of more than 40,000 books, journals, and videos on topics including surgery, public health, infectious diseases, gynecology, psychology, anatomy, neuroscience, tobacco, and homeopathy.

Original members of the collaborative formed in 2010 are:

The Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University [9]
The College of Physicians of Philadelphia [10]
The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library at Yale University [11]
The Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard University [12]
National Library of Medicine [13]
The New York Academy of Medicine [14]
New York Public Library [15]
Open Knowledge Commons [16]
The Welch Medical Library, Library of the Institute of Medicine, and the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions [17]
Wellcome Library [18]
Content contributors [19] have been added during 2011 and 2012; the MHL continues to seek additional content contributors:
Health Sciences and Human Services Library, University of Maryland, the Founding Campus (2012) [20]
Lamar Soutter Library, University of Massachusetts Medical School (2011) [21]
National Institutes of Health Library (2012) [22]
Otis Historical Archives, National Museum of Health and Medicine (2012) [23]
Robert D. Farber University Archives & Special Collections Department, Brandeis University (2012) [24]
Rudolph Matas Health Sciences Library, Tulane University (2012) [25]
University of Toronto Gerstein Science Information Centre (2012) [26]
University of California, San Francisco Legacy Tobacco Documents Library (2012) [27]

Timeline of the Project

2010: MHL founded with grant from the Sloan Foundation; initial digitization of medical history texts begins
2012: Grant for digitizing historic American medical journals received from National Endowment for the Humanities
2012: Grant for processing archival collections received from the Council on Library and Information Science.