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Rare Trove of Army Medical Photos Heads to Flickr
By Alexis Madrigal
An archivist has begun a massive project to make public a newly digitized collection of unique and sometimes startling military medical images, from the Civil War to Vietnam, without the Army's blessing.
This previously unreported archive at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C., contains 500,000 scans of unique images so far, with another 225,000 set to be digitized this year.
Mike Rhode, the museum's head archivist, is working to make tens of thousands of those images, which have been buried in the museum's archive, available on Flickr. Working after hours, his team has posted a curated selection of almost 800 photos on the service already, without the express permission of the Army.
"You pay taxes. These are your pictures," Rhode said. "You should be able to see them."
The collection includes images of injured veterans, medical treatments (like the hernia operation above), the first airplane crash investigation, and public health warnings about the dangers lice posed to World War II soldiers.
While making archives like this one accessible may seem like common sense, many unique collections of photographs, data, and documents remain locked up inside inaccessible archives. The vast majority of the Library of Congress' collections, for example, remain offline.
There used to be a reason for keeping these materials away from the public: They were physical artifacts that were degraded by regular handling. It made sense to preserve them for serious researchers.
Now, though, with the advent of cheap scanning, storage and bandwidth, the barriers to making public domain materials actually available to the public have disappeared. That is, except for organizational inertia and cash.
The organization that runs the NMHM ? the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, funded by the Department of Defense ? hasn't signed off on Rhode's plan to bring medical history photos to the people.
"The Army does not appreciate people using Army resources for sites that they don't consider to be related to your job," Rhode said. Flickr, like many social media sites, is blocked by the Army.
Still, Rhode is continuing to push to get the photos, a precious resource, into the light of the internet.
"We have pictures from all types of military conflicts and all different types of medicine and issues in medicine," Rhode said. "We love the stuff that we're able to play with and want to bring it to everyone else in the world."
Sara Piasecki, the head of historical collections and archives at the Oregon Health Sciences University History of Medicine Library, said that the NMHM collection is unique and better funded than most medical-history resources.
"A lot of the funding agencies are focused on humanities studies, but they almost never include medicine," she said. "That's why the stuff they're doing out in Washington is so important. You don't often get to see those kinds of archives."
For example, one set of photos ? some of which are collected in a Wired.com gallery ? was taken by the Museum and Medical Art Service, a little known branch of the military that tried to document World War II for future reference and education. Thanks to assistant archivist Kathleen Stucker, you can now peruse dozens of pictures from that effort on Flickr.
"We believe in the idea of the museum," Rhode said. "We're going above and beyond."
But it would certainly accelerate their efforts to open the archive to the public if the Army allowed Rhode's team to use the social media tools that have been built for this purpose.
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/03/medarchives.html
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By Alexis Madrigal
An archivist has begun a massive project to make public a newly digitized collection of unique and sometimes startling military medical images, from the Civil War to Vietnam, without the Army's blessing.
This previously unreported archive at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C., contains 500,000 scans of unique images so far, with another 225,000 set to be digitized this year.
Mike Rhode, the museum's head archivist, is working to make tens of thousands of those images, which have been buried in the museum's archive, available on Flickr. Working after hours, his team has posted a curated selection of almost 800 photos on the service already, without the express permission of the Army.
"You pay taxes. These are your pictures," Rhode said. "You should be able to see them."
The collection includes images of injured veterans, medical treatments (like the hernia operation above), the first airplane crash investigation, and public health warnings about the dangers lice posed to World War II soldiers.
While making archives like this one accessible may seem like common sense, many unique collections of photographs, data, and documents remain locked up inside inaccessible archives. The vast majority of the Library of Congress' collections, for example, remain offline.
There used to be a reason for keeping these materials away from the public: They were physical artifacts that were degraded by regular handling. It made sense to preserve them for serious researchers.
Now, though, with the advent of cheap scanning, storage and bandwidth, the barriers to making public domain materials actually available to the public have disappeared. That is, except for organizational inertia and cash.
The organization that runs the NMHM ? the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, funded by the Department of Defense ? hasn't signed off on Rhode's plan to bring medical history photos to the people.
"The Army does not appreciate people using Army resources for sites that they don't consider to be related to your job," Rhode said. Flickr, like many social media sites, is blocked by the Army.
Still, Rhode is continuing to push to get the photos, a precious resource, into the light of the internet.
"We have pictures from all types of military conflicts and all different types of medicine and issues in medicine," Rhode said. "We love the stuff that we're able to play with and want to bring it to everyone else in the world."
Sara Piasecki, the head of historical collections and archives at the Oregon Health Sciences University History of Medicine Library, said that the NMHM collection is unique and better funded than most medical-history resources.
"A lot of the funding agencies are focused on humanities studies, but they almost never include medicine," she said. "That's why the stuff they're doing out in Washington is so important. You don't often get to see those kinds of archives."
For example, one set of photos ? some of which are collected in a Wired.com gallery ? was taken by the Museum and Medical Art Service, a little known branch of the military that tried to document World War II for future reference and education. Thanks to assistant archivist Kathleen Stucker, you can now peruse dozens of pictures from that effort on Flickr.
"We believe in the idea of the museum," Rhode said. "We're going above and beyond."
But it would certainly accelerate their efforts to open the archive to the public if the Army allowed Rhode's team to use the social media tools that have been built for this purpose.
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/03/medarchives.html
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