The UK Medical Heritage Library (UKMHL) is now available as an open access collection via the Historical Texts service: https://ukmhl.historicaltexts.jisc.ac.uk
The collection has been produced through a three year project funded by Jisc and Wellcome Library to digitise over 15 million pages of 19th century published works. Encompassing over 65,000 publications, the subject areas covered are broad and include topics such as consumer health, sport and fitness, food and nutrition as well as medicine and medical practices, providing a valuable resource for study in the medical humanities and beyond.
A range of visualisations have also been created to help researchers explore the data in various ways.
- Image wall: displays all of the images extracted from publications in your search results
- Hospital map: enables you to identify and explore content related to specific hospitals
- Timeline: displays events that occurred in the time period of your search results
- Ngram: compare word frequencies
- Dendrograms: for body parts and medical conditions
- Sunburst diagrams: for body parts and medical conditions
The UKMHL collection is currently in a separate Labs area of the Historical Texts service, but it will also be added to the main service (http://historicaltexts.jisc.ac.uk ) in 2017. So, for institutions that subscribe to Historical Texts, it will be cross-searchable alongside the existing Early English Books Online (EEBO), Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) and 65,000 texts from the British Library 19th Century collections. The collection will continue to be freely available to the general public as well though.
Image link: https://data.ukmhl.historicaltexts.jisc.ac.uk/view?pubId=ukmhl-b21273832&index=ukmhl&pageId=ukmhl-b21273832-117 (publication is in the Public Domain)
Susan Anderton
Service Manager (Historical Texts and Journal Archives, JISC)