Open Knowledge Commons To Create Digital Medical Heritage Library

The Open Knowledge Commons has received a $1.5 million dollar award from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to launch its first major collaborative digitization initiative, a digital Medical Heritage Library project.

The project’s goal is to create a permanent, freely accessible digital library of all published medical heritage literature. This first round of funding will support collaborative digitization of approximately 30,000 volumes of public domain works from the collections of some of the world’s leading medical libraries, including the National Library of Medicine, the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and the New York Public Library.

Future plans for the project foresee the addition of other library partners and the creation of a web site for access to the shared digital collections.

The Open Knowledge Commons (OKC), a nonprofit organization based in Cambridge, MA, is dedicated to building a universal digital library for democratic access to information. OKC works to identify, instigate, and secure funding for projects that expand the digital commons and facilitate its use. Working with research libraries, cultural heritage institutions, funders, and their partners, it supports digitization of printed collections, the open availability and use of scanned and born-digital materials, and the long-term preservation of such works.

For more information, contact Maura Marx at maura at knowledgecommons dot org.

Note: This notice is from the Open Knowledge Commons website.