Collaborating in medical history at DCDC15

02/05/2023

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What is UK-MHL?

»A partnership project: 65k books and pamphlets btw 1780-1914, 15m pages online by Summer 2016

and with

»critical mass of historical medical knowledge from Wellcome and 9 UK HEIs and Royal colleges

»sustainable delivery of open access content»involving academics and practitioners to shape

requirements»building on US MHL (

UK-MHL and Jisc Content services & activities

»UK-MHL brings together different areas of Jisc content: › Digitisation

(PROCUREMENT)› Ingest into Historical Texts

(DELIVERY)› Visualisation tools

(SUPPORTING USE AND IMPACT)

»project provides the blueprint for future activities02/05/202

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USE AND IMPACTCONTENT DELIVERYNEGOTIATIONS

CONTENTPROCUREMEN

T

Framework agreements

PurchasesDigitisation

Historical Texts

Journal Archives

Service enhancementsOther related

projects

Work in

progress

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How it works

Wellcome

£2mJisc£2m

Internet Archive

(digitisation)

Project board

Academic Advisory Group

Content9 HEIs

Internet Archive

Wellcome Digital Library

Jisc Historic TextsVisualising Medical History

• Royal College of Physicians of London• Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh• Royal College of Surgeons of England• University College London• University of Leeds• University of Glasgow• London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine• King's College London• University of Bristol

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How it works

Jisc» Project board

member» Provide funds for

digitisation» Input into

selection process» Set up Academic

Advisory Group» Develop

“interpretative layer”

» Integrate content into Jisc Historical Texts

Wellcome» Project board

member» Provide funds for

digitisation» Manage selection

process and relationship with contributors

» Manage relationship with IA

» Host scan centre» De-duplication» Harvest content

from IA

IA» Set up scan

centre » Deal with

shipments and returns

» Digitisation, QA, OCR

» Liaise with Wellcome about progress and related issues (space, resources, etc)

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Benefits of partnership

»Testing new approaches for more focused and sustainable content digitisation and delivery:› involving content providers and

specialists around a specific theme › pooling finances, achieving

economies of scale in digitisation costs (£0.198/page incl VAT)

› building on existing infrastructure and enhancing it (Historical Texts visualisations)

› enhancing discovery (open access, open licences, API, tools)

› engaging new audiences

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Achievements so farUsage stats – over 600k visitsDigitisation progress

Many thanks to Wellcome Library and Internet Archive!

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Achievements so far

»Project has already attracted good press coverage (hasn’t launched yet!)

»But how do we ensure that researchers and learners can navigate, interrogate and make sense of 15m pages of content without getting lost?

»Visualising Medical History

02/05/2023

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Visualising Medical HistoryAlex Thomas

Digital Content Project Manager, Jisc

Visualising Medical History»A project to visualise 15 million images from the UK

Medical Heritage Library in the Historical Texts platform

(1) ‘The Search Is Over! Exploring Cultural Collections with Visualization’ London, 11-12 Sep 2014 10

65,000 titles

“Cultural institutions are experimenting with new visual interfaces to showcase their

collections by visualising artefacts along diverse dimensions; on the other hand humanities scholars

are developing methods for digital scholarship using visualizations

for literary analysis, cultural analytics, and digital archaeology. These developments are creating new opportunities for rethinking

the way with which digital collections are displayed,

analyzed, and explored.” (1)

Developing visualisations: user groups

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Novice usersUndergraduates

FE studentsGeneral public

Experienced users

Academics in related fields

PostgraduatesLecturersTeachers

Researchers (journalists, authors, advocacy groups etc)

Corpus or domain experts

Medical history academics

Doctoral studentsInformation

professionals

Novice users

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Wall of images – allows users to browse illustrations from within texts and gives

context to search results

Histogram: shows spread of corpus over time

Novice users

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Body part viewer: allows browsing by body part

Word cloud: shows collection themes and keywords

Experienced users

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NGram – shows appearance of words in corpus over time

Histogram: shows spread of corpus over time

Experienced users

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Collections graph: shows overview of collections contents through a graph

(bubble graph in this case)Word cloud: shows collection

themes and keywords

Expert users

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Map of hospitals: displaying all institutions mentioned across the whole corpus on a map

Word cloud: shows collection themes and

keywords

NGram – shows appearance of words in corpus over time

Developing visualisations: user groups

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Novice users

Experienced users

Corpus or domain experts

Word cloud

Collections graph

Body part viewer

Wall of images

Publication timeline

Map of hospitals

NGram viewer

Next steps

»Requirements refinement (Oct-Nov 2015)»Development of visualisations and user testing (Dec

2015 -Mar 2016)»Integration into Historical Texts by end of July 2016»Project blog:

http://digitisation.jiscinvolve.org/wp/the-uk-medical-heritage-library/

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UK Medical Heritage Library Project: a collaborative shared print project

Dr Stella ButlerUniversity of LeedsChair- academic advisory group for UK_MHL

UK-MHL project and Powering Scholarship, RLUK Strategy 2014-2017

• Re-shaping the modern research library collection• The challenge in managing 19th and 20th century print

collections• A shared approach

The essentials of joint stewardship of distributed print collections

• Accurate metadata• Access: inter-library loan or digitsation?• De-duplication• Large-scale digitisation- challenges and the added value

Lessons/questions

• Can we scale up from 7 libraries?• Will electronic access and/or added value of digitisation

increase use of print collections?• Will large-scale digitisation re-shape the research questions

or research agenda?• Will libraries release space?

ContactsPaola MarchionniHead of digital resources for teaching, learning and research JiscPaola.marchionni@jisc.ac.ukTwitter: @paolamarchionni

Dr Stella ButlerUniversity Librarian and Keeper of the Brotherton CollectionUniversity of Leedss.butler@leeds.ac.uk

Alex ThomasDigital content project managerJiscAlex.idris-Thomas@jisc.ac.uk

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Credits

Image credits» Cover image: Wellcome Library, London, The operating theatre, Metropolitan Hospital, London, 1896, http

://wellcomeimages.org/ Metropolitan Hospital photograph album, London Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 

» Slide  6: A series of engravings, representing the bones of the human skeleton : with the skeletons of some of the lower animals (Edinburgh: E. Mitchell, 1819), Medical Heritage Library on Flickr https://goo.gl/2t2FAP . Link to book on Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/seriesofengravin00mitc

» Thanks to Christy Henshaw at Wellcome for providing some of the content for these slides» Slide 13: images from Medical Heritage Library Flickr feed (2013-2015)

https://www.flickr.com/photos/97306593@N02/ » Slide 14: book covers from UK Medical Heritage Library Internet Archive (2015) https://

archive.org/details/ukmhl