Medical History of British India

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 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