Medical History of British India

Happy New Year!

My talented colleagues in the National Library have made a film of me talking about the Medical History of British India project. The 4 minute film is available on YouTube and gives an overview of the content of the online reports.

It also shows what very few people actually see – the rolling stacks where the original reports are stored as part of the India Papers collection.

It is very satisfying that through funding from the Wellcome Trust, digitisation technology and the work of National Library of Scotland staff these pages can now be read around the world. For free!

Enjoy the video.

Currently I am doing some digital work with the Lunatic Asylum reports files. The tif files have been run through a PhotoShop atn routine to produce jpegs. From these, different sized zoomable files will be produced and the htm (transcript) files from OCR will be ingested into our Digital Object Database.
I attended a SPRUCE Digital Mashup last month which paired me with a developer who made me a tool to match tif, htm and pdf files. It has been most useful.
Leeds University Library launched the Sustainable PReservation Using Community Engagement (SPRUCE) project. SPRUCE’s aim is to inspire, guide, support and enable HE, FE and cultural institutions to address digital preservation gaps; and to use the knowledge gathered from that activity to articulate a compelling business case for digital preservation. This is achieved through creative collaboration at events such as Mashups.
I would recommend attending a mashup to anyone who works with digital collections and manages large amount of digital files.

For more information please see:

http://wiki.opf-labs.org/display/SPR/SPRUCE+Mashup+Glasgow
http://www.dpconline.org/advocacy/spruce