Medical Heritage Library
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Medical Heritage Library (MHL) was a digital curation collaborative among several medical libraries which promoted free and open access to quality historical resources in medicine. The MHL is digitized books and journals and worked to expand to the digitization of archival materials and still images. In 2010, the MHL began digitizing titles, mainly monographs, in a variety of medical history and related fields including chemistry, nursing, dentistry, audiology, physiology, psychology, psychiatry, biological science, hydrotherapy, weather, veterinary medicine, gardening, physical culture, and alternative medicine chosen for their scholarly, educational, and research value. Since the inception of the project, materials in audio and video formats have been added to the collection.
The Medical Heritage Library closed in 2024.[1]
The MHL goals were:
- Develop an organizational structure that will ensure sustainability of MHL activities
- Increase institutional membership to ensure rich content contributions and international coverage
- Seek and exploit collaborative opportunities with users, creators, contributors, and peer digital libraries that further the MHL’s work
- Develop methodologies and projects that measure the impact and evaluate the benefits of the Medical Heritage Library to the communities it serves
- Develop and promote tools to enhance discovery and use of content by exposing linkages among the content across partner repositories and across formats
- Develop means to match archaic medical terminology to current terminology in order to expose the relevance of medical historical content to current medical practice, teaching, and research
- Develop access and content management strategies that align with one or more existing large-scale digital projects such as HathiTrust, the Digital Public Library of America and the Biodiversity Heritage Library
- Incorporate preservation as a requirement for future content development
- Continue to improve access to the collection
- Provide leadership regarding access and privacy issues unique to medical content in order to enable access in compliance with applicable ethical, legal, and regulatory codes