NLM Launches “Digital Collections,” a Repository for Access to and Preservation of Digitized Biomedical Resources

From the Web site

The National Library of Medicine (NLM), the world’s largest medical library and a component of the National Institutes of Health, has launched a new digital repository, Digital Collections, at http://collections.nlm.nih.gov. This new resource is complementary to the PubMed Central digital archive of electronic journal articles (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/). The repository allows rich searching, browsing and retrieval of monographs and films from NLM’s History of Medicine Division. Additional content and other format types will be added over time. Users can perform full-text and keyword searching within each collection or across the entire repository.

“The new Digital Collections repository will allow NLM to provide permanent, robust access to an even broader range of biomedical information,” said Betsy Humphreys, Deputy Director, NLM.

Accessing the Collections

This first release of Digital Collections includes a newly expanded set of Cholera Online monographs, a portion of which NLM first published online in PDF format in 2007. The version of Cholera Online now available via Digital Collections includes 518 books (dating from 1817 to 1900) about cholera pandemics of that period. More information about the selection of the books and the subject of cholera may be found on the original Cholera Online Web page at: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/cholera/. Each book was scanned into high-quality TIFF images, which underwent optical character recognition to generate corresponding text files. Finally, a JPEG2000 derivative was created for each page for presentation through the integrated book viewer, which includes a Flash-based zooming feature for resizing and rotating a page on demand.