RESOURCE: Digitization Collaborative Provides Open Access to Over 100 Years of American Medical History through the Internet Archive

The Medical Heritage Library has made 3,907 state medical society journals freely available through the Internet Archive. From the announcement:

The journals – collectively held and digitized by Medical Heritage Library members The College of Physicians of Philadelphia; the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine; the Center for the History of Medicine and Public Health at The New York Academy of Medicine Library; the Health Sciences and Human Services Library, University of Maryland, the Founding Campus; and the Library and Center for Knowledge Management at the University of California at San Francisco – consist of almost three million pages that can be searched online and downloaded in a variety of formats. State medical society journals document the transformation of American medicine at both the local and national level, serving as sites not only for scientific articles, but for medical talks, local news regarding the medical profession, pharmaceutical and device advertising, and unexpurgated musings on medicine and society throughout the 20th century.

The volumes were digitized with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, with additional funding from the Harvard Library, Harvard Medical School, and the Arcadia Fund.

Author: Sarah Melton

Sarah Melton is Head of Digital Scholarship at Boston College. Her group explores and documents new tools and supports teaching and research in a variety of areas that utilize broad methodologies in the digital humanities. She is interested in questions of digital infrastructure, the philosophical underpinnings of ”openness,” and the intersection of public history and digital humanities. She has worked with Open Access Button for the past several years. Sarah holds a PhD from Emory University’s Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts.