FW: [Yulibl] Medical Library Awarded NEH Grant for Digitization of Historical Medical Journals

[Greenberg, Charles]

Kudos to my colleague John for marshalling the forces and supporters for this exciting opportunity....

Charles J Greenberg charles....@yale.edu
Special Projects Librarian, Cushing/Whitney Medical Library
Yale University 203-737-2960
http://library.medicine.yale.edu/about/staff/charlie

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-----Original Message-----
From: yulibl-...@mailman.yale.edu [mailto:yulibl-...@mailman.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Gallagher, John
Sent: Friday, April 27, 2012 12:04 PM
To: yul...@mailman.yale.edu
Subject: [Yulibl] Medical Library Awarded NEH Grant for Digitization of Historical Medical Journals

The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library will digitize early American medical
journals as a part of a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) funded
project awarded to the Medical Heritage Library
<http://www.medicalheritage.org/> (MHL) through the Open Knowledge Commons
(OKC). The Medical Library, a founding partner of the MHL, will contribute
digitized journals to the Medical Heritage Library collection in the
Internet Archive <http://archive.org/details/medicalheritagelibrary> where
they will be freely available to researchers.

³These journals and transactions provide a rich resource of data on
matters relating to everything from local history to legal history, from
housing to welfare policy. And, of course, they remain the basic and
indispensable source for the internal history of the medical profession,
its intellectual and (not unrelated) social development,² explains
Professor Charles Rosenberg, Ernest E. Monrad Professor of the Social
Sciences, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University, a
member of the MHL Scholarly Advisory Committee. ³In my own work, I have
always found the articles, editorials, letters, and transcriptions of
society debates to be fundamental. And only a handful of American
libraries have a comprehensive collection of such materials. The
publications of sectarian groups and local medical societies are
particularly elusive‹yet often provide the most circumstantial
documentation of medical practice and debate Œon the ground.¹²

The grant, from NEH¹s Humanities Collections and Reference Resources
program, will support the digitization of approximately 1,723,036 pages,
an estimated 200 journal titles published between 1797 and 1923, nearly
6,000 journal volumes. The project¹s goal is to make broadly available
complete runs of the nation¹s earliest medical journals. Journals will be
digitized from the collections of the medical libraries of Columbia,
Harvard, and Yale Universities and the College of Physicians of
Philadelphia. The National Library of Medicine and other MHL collaborators
will assist by providing journal volumes that the four participants do not
hold. The digitized journals will join the more than 33,000 monographs,
serials, pamphlets, and films currently available in the MHL. As part of
the project, the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library will digitize
approximately 430,000 pages of rare journals, some of which exist in only
a handful of libraries nationwide.

The MHL is a content centered digital community supporting research,
education, and dialog that enables the history of medicine to contribute
to a deeper understanding of human health and society. It serves as the
point of access to a valuable body of quality curated digital materials
and to the broader digital and non-digital holdings of its members. It was
established in 2010 with funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation via
the Open Knowledge Common to digitize 30,000 medical rare books,
approximately 6,000 of which have come from the Medical Library's
collection. The collaboration has since grown to include additional
principal contributors and contributors of digital content. In addition to
the participants named above, MHL contributors are Johns Hopkins
University, New York Academy of Medicine, the New York Public Library, and
the Wellcome Library; content contributors include Duke University, UMass
Medical School, and the University of Toronto. For more information about
the MHL collection, activities, and collaborators, see
www.medicalheritage.org <http://www.medicalheritage.org>.

Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment
for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature,
philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected,
peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Humanities Collections and
Reference Resources Grants allow institutions to preserve and provide
access to collections essential to scholarship, education, and public
programming in the humanities. Additional information about the National
Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at:
www.neh.gov <http://www.neh.gov>.

For more information about this project, please feel free to contact
either Melissa Grafe, the John R. Bumstead Librarian for Medical History
at the Medical Historical Library, or me.


John

--
John Gallagher
Associate Director
Cushing/Whitney Medical Library
Yale University
PH: (203) 785-5356
FX: (203) 785-5636
http://library.medicine.yale.edu

Discover the Medical Heritage Library at http://www.medicalheritage.org/

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