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.

Update on the online release of 20,000 vaccination reports from British India – the JPEGs and SIDs have been created, files and records checked and transciptions (htm files) ingested into the Library’s Access database.

So far, so good. After my colleagues in the digital team export the Access records to a test site I’ll be checking the metadata and functionability before the records are added to the existing Medical History of British India website.

Meanwhile, I have been editing my intern Simon’s web text about the history of smallpox and man’s attempts to contain and consequently eradicate it. There is also a great section on the vaccination programme in India, highlighting what to expect in the reports. This will be added to the ‘About the collection’ pages alongside some sample images.

We’re planning to have the vaccination reports online early next year if all goes to plan, so watch this blog for more news….

Currently I am creating JPEGS from each of the 24,296 pages of the Vaccination reports. This is done by a Photoshop action (.atn) which usually runs overnight. After this, there are Access queries to check that all the files are present on the Library network and that the sequencing of pages is correct.

Finally, I will ingest the htm transcriptions into the database where each page’s metadata is stored and the Digital Team will export the page records into a test site.

The Vaccination reports are a valuable addition to the Medical History of British India in that they show 19th century efforts to prevent the disfiguring, painful, often fatal epidemic disease and how the British imposed Western medical remedies upon a population that already had their own, much older methods.

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

Currently our Digital Library team are working on exporting around 40,000 digital pages (146 volumes) of Veterinary medicine reports from British India c.1850-1960.

The reports cover Veterinary diseases – mainly surra and rinderpest - and the care of working animals such as camels and elephants. Horse breeding and procurement is also detailed. There are reports from Veterinary colleges and laboratories in India, with the first reports from the Bombay Veterinary College, established in 1886. The College’s website gives a good overview of its history and features people who appear in the Veterinary volumes:

http://www.mafsu.in/bvc/bvccollege/bvc.html

There are also many reports from the Civil Veterinary Department  from regions all over India. The CVD was established to control disease and improve breeding of civil stock, and the reports show the impact of the work on local communities.

Historian Chris Gill is writing a PhD dissertation based on the material and has kindly written some introductory text to it for the website.

I will then inspect the test site before these reports can be added to the main Medical History of British India website.

So watch this space for further news!

(photo is digital object number 75190959 and is from Treatise on elephants by G.H. Evans, 1901, NLS shelfmark IP/16/VB.3)