Our journey to digital curation of the Jeghers Medical Index

Authors

  • Lori Gawdyda MLS, Medical Librarian, Jeghers Medical Index, St. Elizabeth Youngstown Hospital, Youngstown, OH
  • Kimbroe Carter MD, MT, Director, Health Sciences Libraries, Mercy Health, Youngstown, OH; Adjunct Instructor, Computer Technology, Regional College, Kent State University at Trumbull, Warren, OH; and Assistant Professor of Clinical Pathology, Northeast Ohio Medical Universities, College of Medicine, Rootstown, OH
  • Mark Willson Programmer, Thunderstone Software, Cleveland, OH
  • Denise Bedford PhD, Adjunct Professor, Communication, Culture and Technology, Georgetown University, Washington, DC

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5195/jmla.2017.47

Keywords:

Libraries, Digital, Archives, Search Engine, Hospital Library, Databases, Library Science, Historical Medical Archive

Abstract

Background: Harold Jeghers, a well-known medical educator of the twentieth century, maintained a print collection of about one million medical articles from the late 1800s to the 1990s. This case study discusses how a print collection of these articles was transformed to a digital database.

Case Presentation: Staff in the Jeghers Medical Index, St. Elizabeth Youngstown Hospital, converted paper articles to Adobe portable document format (PDF)/A-1a files. Optical character recognition was used to obtain searchable text. The data were then incorporated into a specialized database. Lastly, articles were matched to PubMed bibliographic metadata through automation and human review. An online database of the collection was ultimately created. The collection was made part of a discovery search service, and semantic technologies have been explored as a method of creating access points.

Conclusions: This case study shows how a small medical library made medical writings of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries available in electronic format for historic or semantic research, highlighting the efficiencies of contemporary information technology.

Author Biographies

Lori Gawdyda, MLS, Medical Librarian, Jeghers Medical Index, St. Elizabeth Youngstown Hospital, Youngstown, OH

MLS, Jeghers Medical Index, Medical Librarian

Kimbroe Carter, MD, MT, Director, Health Sciences Libraries, Mercy Health, Youngstown, OH; Adjunct Instructor, Computer Technology, Regional College, Kent State University at Trumbull, Warren, OH; and Assistant Professor of Clinical Pathology, Northeast Ohio Medical Universities, College of Medicine, Rootstown, OH

MD, MT, Health Sciences Libraries, Director

Adjunct Instructor, Computer Technology, Regional College, Kent State University at Trumbull

Assistant Professor of Clinical Pathology, Northeast Ohio Medical Universities, College of Medicine, Rootstown, Ohio

Mark Willson, Programmer, Thunderstone Software, Cleveland, OH

Programmer

Denise Bedford, PhD, Adjunct Professor, Communication, Culture and Technology, Georgetown University, Washington, DC

PhD, Adjunct Professor, Communication, Culture and Technology

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Published

2017-07-07

Issue

Section

Case Report