1. Medical Heritage Library
National Digital Stewardship Alliance
New England Regional Meeting
Kathryn Hammond Baker
Lightning Round
May 10, 2013
[URL:
Culpeper was seventeenth century English apothecary and herbalist; failed theologian and doctor
Worked against trend of Royal College of Physicians to popularize herbal medicine and medicine in general, believing that the Cromwellian/Dissenter trend towards making religious discourse available to all should be taken seriously by other fields of expertise, too
Fought with anti-Royalist forces during English civil war
Culpeper translated the RCP’s “Pharmacopoeia Londonesis” into English and prepared his own texts on astrology, herbalism, and midwifery
Died in 1654 at age 38]

2. Medical Heritage Library
Digital curation collaborative among some of the world’s premier medical libraries
Dedicated to free and open access to quality historical resources in medicine
Initiated in 2010 by 6 American libraries, now 20 participants in North America and Europe
Funded by Sloan, NEH, Mellon/CLIR
47,000 digital objects,
This image presents an example of MHL content (find it at:
earliest item in MHL
gathers together earlier medical texts – Galen, etc.
Only copy in the US – 7 copies in Europe
11 microform copies, 4 in US
Easy to see why we wanted to digitize it – for both access and preservation.
Original collaborations included the medical libraries of Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, the New York Public Library, and the National Library of Medicine. Quickly added the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, Johns Hopkins, and the Wellcome Library.
New content contributors include the below – plus more on the way:
Health Sciences and Human Services Library, University of Maryland, the Founding Campus
Lamar Soutter Library, University of Massachusetts Medical School
NIH Library
Otis Historical Archives, National Museum of Health and Medicine
Robert D. Farber University Archives & Special Collections Department, Brandeis University
Robert W. Woodruff Health Sciences Center Library at Emory University
Rudolph Matas Health Sciences Library, Tulane University
University of Toronto Gerstein Science Information Centre
University of California, San Francisco Legacy Tobacco Documents Library
US Navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery’s Office of Medical History
Weill-Cornell Medical Center Archives

3. www.medicalheritage.org, @medicalheritage
47,000+ items
Audio, visual, text
Journals, monographs, pamphlets, yearbooks
1500s-2000s
English, French, Spanish, German, Latin, Portuguese...
Subjects include:
Anatomy and physiology
Surgery
Naval medicine
Veterinary medicine
Biology
Pathology
Psychiatry
Stored in the Internet Archive in California and Imirrored in Egypt at the Biblioteique Alexandrina
Downloads from
MHL: 2,604,353
Countway (single contributor): 796,427

4. This is our webpage, where users can link the the MHL collection page in the Internet Archives, where the collection is held. IA search has strengths and weaknesses. One of the deficits is no full-text search within the collection. We’ve extracted our MHL metadata and full text, indexed it,, stored it locally, and are just now distributing the very first release of a beta full text search tool.
The Internet Archive has advantages and disadvantages in terms of preservation as well.. For rare materials a digital copy reduces wear and tear on the original. Having that copy far away from the original (California) and Egypt), is a good thing too, even though those storage locations may not be in the most stable locations – one on a major fault line and the other in the Middle East.
The high volume of downloads tells us that many additional copies now exist – but we have little information about them. I’ve got a copy of Jane Austen’s Presuation on my desktop – but I don’t intend to keep it!

5. Local Repository Commitment
Date: Institution: Contact information of person answering questionnaire: (name, title, phone, ) A. Description of Collection What type of material have you digitized (please underline or circle)? books serials manuscripts images other Does the collection have a topical subject or region/geographic emphasis? YES ___ NO ____ If yes, please describe: Please give an estimate of the number of bibliographic works or physical volumes/units in this digital collection. TITLES ______ VOLUMES _______ UNITS (other) _____________ Is this collection static or do you plan to continue digitizing and adding materials? B. Preservation Policies/Procedures In which of the following formats do you maintain the master copies of the content you have contributed or expect to contribute to MHL? Please check all that apply. ___ TIF ___ JPEG 2000 ___ JPEG ___ PDF-A ___ PDF ___ other. Please specify:
That’s why we have been committed to holding local copies and encourage content conttributors to do the same. We ask content contributors to complete this questionnaire, designed by Janet Gertz of Columbia, to tell us of their preservation plans.
While there are also questions about copyright practices, the majority of the questions focus on current policies and procedures and future plans for preservation of the digital objects. The forms are then stored on the project wiki and updated as necessary.
In reviewing completed forms, I discovered that while most are committed to maintaining a local copy of the objects in a local preservation repository, few had accomplished this goal. MOST ARE USING ONLY THE INTERNET ARCHVIE. Reasons for failing to preserve a copy locally included lack of resources, institutional lack of commitment, lack of technical infrastructure, and long term plans that have yet to be realized.

6. Medical Heritage Library
Internet Archive: archive.org/details/medicalheritagelibrary
Website:
Twitter: twitter.com/MedicalHeritage
Facebook:
[URL:
Culpeper was seventeenth century English apothecary and herbalist; failed theologian and doctor
Worked against trend of Royal College of Physicians to popularize herbal medicine and medicine in general, believing that the Cromwellian/Dissenter trend towards making religious discourse available to all should be taken seriously by other fields of expertise, too
Fought with anti-Royalist forces during English civil war
Culpeper translated the RCP’s “Pharmacopoeia Londonesis” into English and prepared his own texts on astrology, herbalism, and midwifery
Died in 1654 at age 38]
So without local commitment or resources to build a collaborative digital library, what are the options? In the short run, we are negotiating with a preservation repository in Europe to mirror MHL content. This repository’s original content will be mirrored in the Internet Archive where it will be tagged MHL. Similar to the Biodiversity Heritage Library’s approach to mirroring in regional repositories, this will result in replication of much content, but not all.
In the longer term, we are thinking about how to motivate institutions to advance preservation capabilities locally. What incentives can we provide? We have taken advantage of funding opportunities and made preservation activities a requirement for joining collaborative grant projects– but contributed content is growing more rapidly than new grant-funded content… what more can we do?
Your perspectives and experiences are most welcome. We look forward to hearing from you.