Mission Statement
From the Medical Heritage Library (MHL) website, the organization is guided by the following mission:
“The Medical Heritage Library, Inc. is a collaborative digitization and discovery organization committed to providing open access to the history of medicine and health resources.”
Furthermore, the organization identifies their vision:
”We aspire to be a visible, research-driven history of medicine and health community that serves a broad, interdisciplinary constituency. Our goal is to make quality history of medicine and health content available online free of charge and to simplify and centralize the discovery of these resources.”
In these efforts, MHL actively seeking opportunities to digitize primary resources in the history of medicine through and to identify like-minded institutions willing to share content through the MHL’s Internet Archive collection.
History
The MHL was initiated by the Open Knowledge Commons, which was awarded $1.5 million dollars in start-up funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to begin digitization at partner libraries in 2010. MHL was primarily built through four successive grants:
- “Medical Heritage Library Phase I: 2010–2011” (Alfred P. Sloan Foundation)
- “Planning for an Innovative Partnership: The Medical Heritage Digital Collaborative: 2011–2012” (National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Start-Up Grant)
- “Expanding the Medical Heritage Library: Preserving and Providing Online Access to Historical Medical Periodicals: 2012–2014” (National Endowment for the Humanities, Humanities Collections and Reference Resources)
- “Medicine at Ground Level: State Medical Societies, State Medical Journals, and the Development of American Medicine and Society: 2014–2017” (National Endowment for the Humanities)
MHL was incorporated as 501(C)3 nonprofit organization in 2018.
Financial Information
Prior to incorporation, MHL was been sustained through grant funding from: Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. MHL received additional financial support from Harvard Medical School and the Arcadia Fund through the Harvard University Library for the NEH funded project ”Medicine at Ground Level: State Medical Societies, State Medical Journals, and the Development of American Medicine and Society: 2014–2017”.
MHL was incorporated as 501(C)3 nonprofit organization in 2018 and is now funded through a membership model. Their 8 principal member institutions pay the same annual fee to support the repository.
As of 2016, principal contributors paid an annual membership fee of $4000.00. MHL membership can be covered through in-kind service to support MHL administration, communications, and/or discovery. Based on the MHL 2018-19 Annual Report, the organization collected $20,000 in membership dues and saw a total of $14,923 in expenses for that fiscal year.
Governance: Board / Owners / Parent organization
As previously stated, Medical Heritage Library was incorporated in 2018 and has since been overseen by its board of directors, duly elected by the membership. The Board of Directors for 2019-2020 are:
- President (term ending June 30, 2020) – Melissa Grafe
- Vice-President (term ending June 30, 2020) – Emily Novak Gustainis
- Secretary (term ending June 30, 2021) – Robin Naughton
- Treasurer (term ending June 30, 2021) – Beth Lander
MHL consists of 8 principal, institutional members with governance and voting rights and approximately 30 nonvoting content contributors. Current institutional members are:
- Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de Santé (BIU Santé)
- The College of Physicians of Philadelphia
- The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library at Yale University
- The Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard University
- The New York Academy of Medicine
- UCSF Library
- Wellcome Library
- National Library of Medicine
MHL is always seeking new principal members and content contributors.
MHL is supported by a Scholarly Advisory Committee, as well as four working groups designed to advocate for, advance public awareness of, and improve access to MHL resources. The working groups include: Content and Metadata, Grants and Fundraising, Communications and Outreach, and Collaboration and Education. Previously, two working groups, Non-Profit Status and World War I Online Exhibit, completed their work and dissolved.
The MHL bylaws are openly available online.
Technical Information
The MHL’s collection of digitized medical rare books, pamphlets, journals, and films are available through the Internet Archive’s access portal. According to MHL’s annual report, the current collection in IA includes over 303,000 items.
In June of 2019 it was announced that through a partnership with the U.S. National Library of Medicine, MHL will be including digitized NLM historical materials and associated metadata in the NLM’s free and open archive of historical resources.
Preservation
According to the Final Report for MHL’s 2017 NEH grant: MHL is ensures continued access and long-term preservation of its grant-funded digitized content by utilizing both the Internet Archive (IA) and individual institutional preservation repositories to sustain digital files. The primary Internet Archive data centers are located in multiple locations within the greater San Francisco Bay area in California, USA. Additionally, IA has two geographically distributed locations for backing up copies of files (Egypt and Amsterdam). Additionally, metadata for all of the MHL’s IA content was ingested into the Digital Public Library of America, visible to the public while also serving as a secondary metadata repository.
Access
The MHL’s collection of digitized medical rare books, pamphlets, journals, and films are available through the Internet Archive’s access portal. MHL has developed its own advanced search interface, and as of April 2019 it provided full text search of 260,000 items. According to MHL’s website, this tool offers search refinement not available in the Internet Archive’s search function.
Additionally, MHL provides content overview and context on their website for select collection items including: State Medical Society Journals, Primary Resource Set collections – “Vaccines” and “Disability”, and Historical American Medical Journals.
In 2019, MHL began working with Yale University’s Digital Humanities Lab on a program called PixPlot, developed to navigate and group images using a trained neural network in order to provide a way for researchers to search for individual images within this massive corpus.
Legal Information
Under a NEH grant in 2015, MHL secured agreements with State medical society journal publishers to provide free and open access to journal content currently under copyright.
In 2018, the United States National Library of Medicine signed a three-year Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the MHL to promote free and open access to quality historical resources in medicine and the human health sciences.
Sources
Emily R. Novak Gustainis, "Ever-evolving: introducing the Medical Heritage Library, Inc", Journal of the Medical Library Association, 2019 Apr; 107(2): 265–269 http://jmla.pitt.edu/ojs/jmla/article/view/651
"2018-2019 MHL, Inc. Annual Report", Medical Heritage Library, https://docs.google.com/document/d/18KQSQxPk7gjH5lO6xhg2MjkY2olkDGQM5hb… May 2020.
"Final Performance Report: Medicine at Ground Level: State Medical Societies, State Medical Journals, and the Development of American Medicine", July 26, 2017 http://www.medicalheritage.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/NEH-final-per… May 2020.
"Governance", Medical Heritage Library, http://www.medicalheritage.org/about/governance-planning/ Accessed May 2020. "MHL Membership Structure", Medical Heritage Library, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MVLw2BGuprC2zHi2FyPjvU2QNvxQDPDUyiA… May 2020.
"Mission and Vision", Medical Heritage Library, http://www.medicalheritage.org/mission-vision/ Accessed May 2020.
"NLM and Medical Heritage Library to Expand Public Access to Collections", National Library of Medicine, June 18 2019, https://www.nlm.nih.gov/news/Expansion_Public_Access_Collections.html A… May 2020.
