The University of Michigan Center for the History of Medicine, in partnership with the U-M Library's MPublishing division, has announced the release of The American Influenza Epidemic of 1918-1919: A Digital Encyclopedia, an original, open access digital collection of archival, primary, and interpretive materials related to the history of the 1918-1919 influenza epidemic in the US.
The collection, located at www.influenzaarchive.org, contains more than 16,000 digitised documents - correspondence, minutes of organisation and group meetings, reports from agencies and charities, newspaper accounts, military records, diaries, photographs, and more. Additionally, it also contains interpretive materials contributed by scholars of history and public health.
The digital encyclopaedia is the culmination of more than five years of the Center's ongoing research in collaboration with the Global Migration and Quarantine Division of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
MPublishing worked with the Center for the History of Medicine to create the underlying architecture of the digital encyclopaedia, as well as its functionality and user interface.
The U-M Library has been leading library digitisation and digital publishing since the 1995 'Making of America' project. Its 2004 partnership with Google to digitise its collection laid the groundwork for HathiTrust, an inter-institutional digital library of over ten million volumes, about 30 percent of which are freely available online.
Funding for this digital project was provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Awards in Health Policy Research Program, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, including the 'We the People' designation acknowledging the Center's efforts to enrich the teaching, study and understanding of American history and culture.
