The History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) has announced the release of its prototype History of Medicine Finding Aids Consortium, a search-and-discovery tool for archival resources in the health sciences that are described by finding aids and held by various institutions throughout the US. A finding aid is a tool created by archivists to give information about the contents of archival collections.
Finding aids provide contextual information about collections oftentimes with detailed inventories to help researchers locate relevant materials. NLM claims to be the world's largest medical library and a component of the National Institutes of Health.
The resource crawls existing Web content managed by several partner institutions, offers keyword search functionality, and provides results organised by holding institution. Links point to the holding institution's websites. Formats indexed consist of HTML, PDF and Encoded Archival Description XML. The project does not include content held in bibliographic utilities or other database-type information. Crawls are conducted monthly to ensure information is current and to capture new content as it is released.
Current Consortium partners are: NLM History of Medicine Division, Archives and Modern Manuscripts Program; Columbia University Health Center Library Archives and Special Collections; Medical Archives of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions; University of California-San Francisco Library Archives and Special Collections; University of Virginia Health Sciences Library Historical Collections; and Virginia Commonwealth University Tompkins-McCaw Library Special Collections and Archives.
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