Digital spine

Freeing the LAMS from the Silos; or, How We Learned to Love MARC for the Sake of BIBFRAME

Staff Breaking news, Digital spine, Happenings April 27, 2017April 27, 2017Cataloguing, Libraries and museums, MARC, Metadata

On April 1^st, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia released what we lovingly refer to as the “Digital Spine,” one of the few catalogs in the United States that merges descriptions of, and access to, library, archival and museum collections.

Approximately 145,000 bibliographic records for collections in the Historical Medical Library and approximately 28,000 records for objects in the Mütter Museum will be merged in a single, cross-searchable database. To sample this integration, go to https://cpp.ent.sirsi.net/client/en_US/library and search for “foreign bodies.”

A Collaboratively Created Corpus: Digitizing the State Medical Society Journals

Tristan Dahn Digital spine, Education and outreach, Happenings, Out of the stacks, Staff projects November 16, 2015August 4, 2020History of medicine, Outreach, State Medical Society Journals

Starting in March 2015, the Historical Medical Library of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia (HML) embarked on its second large scale digitization project. Under grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Arcadia Foundation, and in conjunction with our partners at the Medical Heritage Library (MHL), a digital curation collaborative, we are working to digitize the entirety of State Medical Society Journals published in the US throughout the 20^th Century.

The culmination of the project will be over 2.5 million pages of fully searchable digitized content. Patrons will be able to access this material through the MHL, as well as the Internet Archive, whose facilities in Princeton will be doing the digitization. This will be the first time that all of this content will be available in one place, either in print or digitally.

A selection of State Medical Society Journals on the shelf in our stacks.