The Medical History of British India Online Project at the National

The Medical History of British India Online project Jan Usher, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK Abstract The paper will show how we took a little-known yet rich resource and turned it into a globally available one. It will examine the origins, success and future plans for this Wellcome Trust-funded project to microfilm and digitise approximately 200 rare and vulnerable medical volumes published by the Government of India between ca1850 and 1950. These publications record the demands placed by both epidemic and endemic diseases on the colonial Indian state and its development of public health. It includes reports on army health, medicines, veterinary research, lock hospitals and medical institutes and colleges. The site can be searched by keyword, or by category (titles, contents pages, diseases and associated terms, maps, diagrams, place names, publishers, authors and year of publication). The various complexities and pitfalls in the planning process will be presented as well as some of the practical difficulties encountered, with images and descriptions of some of the material involved. Parameters essential to enable effective presentation and exploitation of the material will be discussed, including copyright issues, maintaining the site, and enabling free world-wide access. The resulting web feature will be presented along with discussion of future digitisation plans. The paper will also discuss the continuing benefits of the project, including forging successful long-term academic partnerships. Introduction: The story of this project began around 6 years ago, when I was asked to promote the National Library of Scotland’s Official Publication Unit’s (OPU) collections. This is huge: as a result of the 1710 Copyright Act, the Library's historical background as the library of the Faculty of Advocates, and its status as a copyright library, the NLS has collections of around 14 million items, over 2 million of which are official publications. This means OPU has comprehensive coverage of publications from the Westminster and Scottish Parliaments, together with the publications of their respective government departments and agencies. We also have extensive collections of overseas publications, including material from the United States and Commonwealth countries. The Library acts as a depository library for the United Nations as well as receiving material published by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, Food and Agriculture Organisation and World Health Organisation. Basically, if a publication is government-related or funded, we will probably have it. The OPU team are 10 very enthusiastic staff who are involved in all aspects of the receipt, cataloguing and maintenance of the stock. We also provide a specialist enquiry service for anyone requiring information on any aspects of the collection. India Papers: Amongst the OPU collection are the India Papers - around 4,200 bound volumes (ca. 40,000 individual reports) of official documents published in India. This collection is 1 unique in Scotland, and is equaled in the UK by a collection in the British Library, which, though similar, is not identical. It includes publications of the central (or Imperial) government and of many Indian states, most, but not all of which, came under British rule. The great majority of the collection dates from the 1850s up to Independence. Most of the collection was deposited in the Library under a scheme administered by the India Office, or published in the UK on behalf of Indian governments and acquired by the Library under the terms of the Copyright Act. It has been added to over the years with other purchases and donations, especially from the Advocates’ Library. The collection covers a huge variety of subjects. It has particular strengths in the coverage of medicine, education, the military and archaeology, containing statistics, journals, memoirs, manuals, maps, surveys connected to local and national administration and institutions and the government surveys (archaeology, geology, zoology, and so on). Our first step to promote the collection was to catalogue it. The collection had previously been recorded in a hand-list, which was located in our main reading room. This was obviously inconvenient, especially as most readers search our collections through our on-line catalogue1. Certain aspects of the hand-list are useful, however, namely the subject/location guides, so we include these on our web pages2. The collection is arranged by State, and sub-divided by subject headings loosely based on Campbell3 ; they were then re-organised into a broad subject classification of 24 subjects. All shelfmarks begin with IP (India Papers), then each state is identified by a number; so, for instance, all papers of the Bengal Presidency have shelfmarks beginning IP/6. Similarly, letter codes are given for subjects, e.g. the material on famines is denoted by the code FB. This enables readers to browse the catalogue. While the collection was being catalogued we were busy promoting the collection; the Library was undergoing a change of administration at that time, and new senior staff were being appointed. A new vision and mission statement for the Library was drawn up, emphasising access for all, which chimed perfectly with our goal of promoting our collections. Dr Kevin Halliwell, co-applicant of the project and Foreign Collections curator (who was also strengthening our modern South Asian collections through purchasing and promotion), and I became the Library’s South Asian collections “team”, despite not being South Asianists. Where we needed expertise we consulted our partners at Edinburgh and Strathclyde Universities, and colleagues in the South Asia Archive & Library Group (SAALG). So we strengthened our partnerships out of necessity and began fruitful links with library, archive and academic partners. We put on some small displays in the public areas of the Library, show-casing the variety of material in the collection. This culminated in a major exhibition opened by Prince Philip in summer 2007, “Tea & Tigers: Stories of Scotland and South Asia”, which featured some of the India Papers collection as well as our South Asian rare books, maps and manuscripts. The project: 1 http://main-cat.nls.uk/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?DB=local&PAGE=First. 2 http://www.nls.uk/collections/officialpublications/collections/india-catalogue-guide.html 3 Campbell, Frank. Index-catalogue of Indian official publications in the Library, British Museum. London, 1900. 2 Over this period, our academic partners advised us that the medical material in the India Papers collection was a rich resource, revealing of the role of government and law and the operation of colonial power in a medical context, with detailed information on colonial medicine with drawings, maps, charts, graphs, illustrations and photographs. In addition, it was difficult to get access to these publications in India, because even where libraries have them, readers cannot gain access because they are too fragile to issue and/or because of distances involved, i.e. India is a huge country, so travelling round all the relevant libraries is not only time-consuming but costly. In some cases there are no easily available catalogues. The collection is comprised of brittle paper, so any promotion would encourage use (desirable) leading to damage (undesirable). Digitisation was the obvious route. Our aim was to produce preservation microfilm copies of the material as well as digital images, and to provide access to texts through a web-based feature that would enable keyword searching and searching by title, author, subject category, publication date and location. The Library would benefit by getting digital surrogates that didn’t need to be handled (and therefore compromise the preservation of the volumes), and would enable to exploit it fully on a global scale. Again, we drew on our partnerships to provide in-depth text for the site. Digital and database rights: All the material was classed as crown copyright, but most of the material was out of copyright in any case. Works that are created by servants of the Crown or Government departments and agencies, and works that have been commissioned by the Crown are classed as crown copyright. The duration of copyright in crown copyright material differs from that of other material (50 rather than 70 years after death, for example). Electronic “copyright” is not a legal term, but protection is still afforded to digital images and databases selected and created by an “author” for a particular purpose. However, the NLS’s aim with this project is to spread the content as widely as possible, as well as the preservation and promotion of the collection. Complexities and pitfalls: We approached the Wellcome Trust, which, as well as funding biomedical research, also has a Research Resources in Medical History grant scheme. Our successful application to them described our collection and its significance and also its value to historians and researchers. The collection was too large to digitise all at once (the Trust limits each award to ca. £100,000), so we started modestly, with 44 volumes relating to disease control. The Library is fortunate to have in-house digital experts, conservators, reprographics and web staff who could advise us on the practicalities of the project which enabled us to compile a list of procedures: • 1. Cataloguing • 2. Conservation preparation • 3. Initial conservation work • 4. Creation of project records (metadata) 3 • 5. Preparation for microfilming • 6. Microfilming • 7. Automated scanning of greyscale text and illustrations • 8. Manual scanning of pages containing colour elements • 9. Creation of searchable text using OCR software and Photoshop • 10. Storage of digital surrogates • 11. Website design and creation • 12. Long-term preservation of digital images • 13. Maintenance of website • 14. Final conservation work It’s a long list. But each one was important, and each had to be costed, timescales drawn up, and impacts on workloads measured, as we had not attempted exactly this kind of project before.

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