Our journey to digital curation of the Jeghers Medical Index.

Our journey to digital curation of the Jeghers Medical Index.

Gawdyda Lori; Carter Kimbroe; Willson Mark; Bedford Denise

Journal of the Medical Library Association

2017

2017-07

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.

Ohio; Access to Information; PubMed; Abstracting and Indexing; Digitizers; Information Retrieval; Medical Literature; Metadata; Libraries; Hospital – Ohio

Article information provided for research and reference use only. All rights are retained by the journal listed under publisher and/or the creator(s).

249–253

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