An Army archivist is undertaking a massive project to digitize and make public a unique collection of rare and sometimes startling military medical images, from the Civil War to Vietnam.
This previously unreported archive at the Army-run 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.
"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. ...
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. ...
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." ...
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
