Medical Heritage Library

Abstract

Medical Heritage Library. Multiple Partners. http://www.medicalheritage.orgThe growing availability of digital resources is transforming scholarship and teaching in the history of health care. The digital collections of medical history libraries are not meant to replace print sources and physical objects but rather to expand the reach of these institutions and increase accessibility for scholars and teachers who lack the resources to travel to the collections in person. Until now, one had to search the digital collections of research libraries and heritage institutions one by one. The Medical Heritage Library (MHL) streamlines this process by providing free and open access to authoritative historical resources from leading medical libraries. The MHL is a digital collaborative of medical history libraries whose stated 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."1The MHL is part of a larger advocacy movement to provide free public access to digitized materials. At the forefront of these efforts is the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving "born digital" content on the web. The principles of open access adopted by the Internet Archive and its partners grew out of concerns that control of knowledge on the web was rapidly being monopolized by subscription-only enterprises such as JStor and Ebscohost. The Internet Archive also responded to fears that materials on the web were rapidly disappearing into the past, eventually leading to a "digital dark age."2The MHL collaborative began in the summer of 2009 when curators of historical collections at the medical libraries of Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and the National Library of Medicine along with the Open Knowledge Commons, an offshoot of the Internet Archive's Open Content Alliance, received a start-up grant of $1.5 million from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to digitize over thirty thousand books relating to the history of health and medicine from their collections over the following three years.The MHL collection has expanded dramatically since that time and currently contains tens of thousands of digitized medical rare books, pamphlets, journals, and films available through the MHL and the Internet Archive. The collection only contains materials that are in the public domain under U.S. copyright law or that have received permission from the holder(s) of the copyright to make digital versions available online. The principal contributors are the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard University, the New York Academy of Medicine, the U.S. National Library of Medicine, the Welch Medical Library, Library of the Institute of the History of Medicine and the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, and Wellcome Library in London. …