Martin R. Kalfatovic, Assistant Director, Digital Services Divsion, was invited by the recently formed Medical Heritage Library (MHL) to share some some thoughts about the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). The meeting was held in Rochester, MN, just around the corner from the famed Mayo Clinic. The MHL was formed in late 2009 using BHL as a model. Though the content of the two projects is much different, the congruent similarity is the focus on the heritage literature of the respective disciplines. Working with funding from the Open Knowledge Commons through the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the MHL is a consortium of many of the top history of medicine collections in the United States. Members are:
- The National Library of Medicine (Bethesda, MD)
- Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine (Harvard Medical School)
- New York Public Library
- Long Health Sciences Library (Columbia University)
- Cushing/Whitney Medical Library (Yale University)
Also on the presentation panel with me was Lori Jahnke (The College of Physicians of Philadelphia), CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow in Academic Libraries who is working access methodology for medical history collections.
His presentation, An Anatomy of a Mass Scanning Project: The Biodiversity Heritage Library, can be found below. You may recognize the illustrations in the presentation as being from Smithsonian Libraries' copy of Andreas Vesalius, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543) in the Dibner Library collection.
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