The UK Medical Heritage Library is making 68,000 19th century texts relating to the history of medicine freely available to all.
We’re working with the Wellcome Library on this three-year project along with nine other UK universities who are all contributing content to this collection. The collection is openly available via the Wellcome Library and the Internet Archive and from November 2016 will be available from our Historical Texts platform which already contains some 350,000 texts from the 15th to the 19th centuries.
The UKMHL is running the following launch events to mark the UK Medical Heritage Library addition to the Jisc Historical Texts platform and to celebrate the work of those involved in the digitisation.
Library Live Lab:
The lab is a precursor to the UK Medical Heritage Library Symposium on 27 October also held at the Wellcome Trust in London. Lunch and refreshments will be provided. Travel bursaries may be made available on request to those registered as students. The lab has been organised to encourage students, academics and researchers from any discipline to explore and develop ideas around the use of the rich text and image assets which the collection provides.
The focus is on medical humanities but anyone with an interest in digital approaches to teaching, learning and research is welcome to come along to work on ideas. You don’t have to be an expert digital humanist to attend this event. In fact, we are really looking for subject specialists with an eye for the unusual. It’s about exploring patterns, thinking about texts in terms of where they sit in a corpus, how they relate to data elsewhere and about extracting and creating information that can tell new stories about the content. Some of your ideas may well result in new tools for the Historical Texts platform, and it is envisage that there will be a series of the live labs to continue the explorations of this first event. To register, visit the event page.
Library Symposium:
The Symposium, on 27th October, is for us to launch the content and have a conversation about the resource and its potential impact. The Live Lab, on 26th October, is the first in a series of events in which we seek to explore the uses of resources such as the UKMHL in teaching, learning and research with a particular emphasis on the development of additional tools to aid the exploration of text and images. To register, visit the event page.