"Digital Collections is the
National Library of Medicine's free
online archive of biomedical books and videos. All of the content in
Digital Collections is freely available worldwide and, unless otherwise
indicated, in the public domain. Digital Collections provides unique
access to NLM's rich, historical resources.
About the Collections
Texts
The majority of the texts within Digital Collections were digitized
at NLM using a Kirtas KABIS III scanning system, which produces several
files per page and per book. After cropping, deskewing and reviewing
the source images, additional image derivatives and metadata are then
created using NLM-defined scripts. A smaller number of texts were
digitized from original or microfilm by a vendor offsite.
The texts comprising the
Medicine in the Americas
collection were digitized for a multi-institutional digital library
project, the Medical Heritage Library, which uses Internet Archive to
host its collection. Therefore NLM routinely deposits copies of its
digitized books to
Internet Archive. More information on the Medical Heritage Library can be found
here.
Films
The films available in Digital Collections come from NLM's reel and
videotape holdings of government and military-created productions. The
source material was digitized to MPEG2 format, which served as the
digital master for the range of video derivatives offered by the
repository. Each film was manually transcribed, with time-coded captions
then created using WGBH's Magpie application."
Ernster, the Virtual Library Cat
