Expanding the Medical Heritage Library: Preserving and Providing Online Access to Historical Medical Periodicals

FAIN: PW-51014-12

College of Physicians of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, PA 19103-3001)
Maura Marx (Project Director: July 2011 to September 2013)
Michelle DiMeo (Project Director: September 2013 to March 2015)

The digitization of approximately 200 historical medical journals, held by five major libraries, for free online access via the Medical Heritage Library (MHL) collection on the Internet Archive (IA) as well as through the HathiTrust digital repository.

This project provides for the selection and digitization of up to 200 historical American medical journal titles dating from 1797 to 1923 (approximately 7,350 volumes or 2,152,000 pages) both to preserve them and to make them freely available publicly via the Medical Heritage Library(MHL) collection on the Internet Archive website. These titles, which will be selected with the advice of scholars in a range of disciplines, will be complemented by 30,000 digitized medical rare books from 1750 to 1923, already contained in the MHL. The medical journal titles to be digitized will be drawn from the collections of the collaborating libraries, with any missing volumes supplied by the National Library of Medicine and other MHL collaborators. The availability of the digitized collection will be widely publicized via the MHL website, social media, and network of advising scholars.