Medical Library Awarded NEH Grant for Digitization of Historical Medical Journals

[Forwarded from the SPARC OA Forum] “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 (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 where 
they will be freely available to researchers. ‘These 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,’ 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. ‘In 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 on the ground.’ 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...”