News from the NLM History of Medicine Division
Greetings from the National Library of Medicine History of Medicine Division where we have the following news to share:
* Reminder! October 19, 2020, is the deadline for responses to the NLM Request for Information (RFI) to guide the continuing implementation of its strategic plan through 2027. Learn more.
* NLM announces Care and Custody: Past Responses to Mental Health, a new NLM traveling exhibition with an online adaptation.
* Washington Post features newly-published curation of NLM historical audio-visuals. Learn more from NLM’s Medicine on Screen.
* Journal of the Medical Library Association publishes “The National Library of Medicine Global Health Events web archive, coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic collecting,” by Susan L. Speaker and Christie Moffatt.
* The NLM Web Collecting and Archiving Working Group continues to identify and select web and social media content web archive collection. Now including 3,700+ URLs (650+ gigabytes), the collection includes federal, state, and local government COVID-19 pages, websites of disaster relief agencies and NGOs, and content documenting life in quarantine, prevention measures, the experiences of healthcare workers, patients, and more. The group is actively reviewing recommended content for inclusion in the archive (5200+ URLs nominated to date), scoping and running crawls of content using Archive-It and Conifer (formerly Webrecorder), reviewing archived sites for quality, and adding metadata. The group continues to engage with other cultural heritage organizations archiving the history of COVID-19, including the group spearheaded by the leadership of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, as well as the group of federal agencies who meet regularly to discuss their respective initiatives. The NLM Web Collecting and Archiving Working Group also continues to engage with the Society of American Archivists Web Archiving Section, the Archive-It community, the National Digital Stewardship Alliance, and is contributing to and following the growing list of institutions collecting COVID-19 related content maintained by the Documenting the Now project. Nominations for content to include in NLM’s Global Health Events collection remain welcome via nlmwebcollecting@nlm.nih.gov. NLM also continues to participate as an institutional contributor to a broader International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) Novel Coronavirus outbreak web archive collection. IIPC registered their Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) collection in the World Pandemic Research Network, here. Individual recommendations for the IIPC collection can be submitted using the form available here.
* Building on the January 2020 release and public announcement of the first fully-digitized manuscript collections in NLM Digital Collections, NLM announces the release of four additional archival collections:
* papers of June Osborn, chair of the National Commission on AIDS;
* papers of Joseph Kinyoun, founder of the Marine Hospital Service Hygienic Laboratory, predecessor institution of the NIH, and director of plague eradication activities in San Francisco from 1899 to 1901;
* papers of Lawrence Kolb, pioneer in the medical approach to narcotics addiction treatment and in public health research and treatment of mental illness, and one of the first to advocate treating drug addicts as patients, not criminals;
* letters of Florence Nightingale.
* Upcoming NLM History Talks taking place virtually:
* October 15, 2020 at 2pm ET: Cynthia Connolly, RN, FAAN, Professor of Nursing, Rosemarie B. Greco Endowed Term Chair in Advocacy, and Associate Director, Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing, University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, speaking on New Drugs, Old Problems: The Sulfonamide Revolution and Children’s Health Care Delivery in the United States, 1933-1949.
* December 3, 2020 at 2pm ET: Ashley Bowen, PhD, Editor, Perspectives on History, American Historical Association, speaking on Rise, Serve, Lead…and Publish: Including Women Physicians’ Writings in Rise, Serve, Lead: America’s Women Physicians.
All are warmly welcome! Mark your calendars, participate in the Q&As via the live feedback interface of the videocast, read speaker interviews on our popular blog Circulating Now, and watch archived livestreams of previous talks in the NIH Videocast archive of History of Medicine programs.
* Are you undertaking and/or have you completed historical research in NLM’s collections? Would you like to share it freely with a wide audience? We warmly invite you to be a guest author on our blog Circulating Now. Featured in the Washington Post, Circulating Now circulates widely, reaching more than 5,500 direct subscribers and 345,000 followers as part of the official NLM social media network. If you would like to write about your research in our collections, please send an email proposing your topic to Beth Mullen, managing editor, at elizabeth.mullen@nih.gov. If you do not already subscribe to Circulating Now, please do-just look for the “Follow us via email” box on the right-side of the homepage.
* NLM Reading Rooms remain closed to the public until further notice in continued accordance with recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and to promote social distancing. During this period, NLM online resources remain available, including NLM Digital Collections and PubMed Central. NLM staff continue to serve patrons remotely as circumstances allow, and they continue to provide interlibrary loan (ILL) services from electronically available resources. For the latest NLM ILL service information check here. For the latest NLM Reading Room information check here.