The UK Medical Heritage Library is a three-year project, funded by Jisc and the Wellcome Library. The project will make 68,000 19th century texts relating to the history of medicine freely available to all.
The project has produced electronic surrogates of over 15 million pages of medical texts dating between 1780 and 1914 from 9 partner libraries. The team have also produced a discovery layer that allows various forms of visualisations of searches within the library from simple date lines, to word clouds to the extraction of images.
The project is co-designed with RLUK, and informed by an academic advisory group, which is chaired by Stella Butler, university librarian and keeper of the Brotherton Collection, University of Leeds.
Two events are being held in support of the project. A symposium, on 27 October, will launch the content and explore its potential impact. The Live Lab, on 26 October, is the first in a series of events where additional tools will be developed to aid the exploration of text and images. The labs will be beneficial to both students and those carrying out research or those who are teaching.
Further information on the project can be found on the Jisc website.
Top image courtesy of Wellcome Library, London
