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NLM Launches Web Content Collecting Initiative

New forms of publication on the web, such as blogs authored by doctors and patients, illuminate healthcare thought and practice in the 21st century. In launching this initiative, the library is capturing and providing a unique resource for future scholarship.

The library’s inaugural collection of web content is “Health and Medicine Blogs,” presenting the perspectives of physicians, nurses, hospital administrators, and other individuals in healthcare fields. The collection also includes patients chronicling their experiences with conditions such as cancer, diabetes, and arthritis. The site currently contains 12 blogs, including KevinMD.com, “social media’s leading physician voice”; Not Running a Hospital, a blog by a former CEO of a large Boston hospital; e-patient Dave, a cancer survivor and leader in the participatory medicine movement; and Wheelchair Kamikaze, who writes about his personal experience living with multiple sclerosis (MS). The collection can be accessed from www.nlm.nih.gov/webcollecting.

Guided by the NLM Collection Development Manual and other strategic collecting efforts, NLM will continue to expand its capacity to collect web content. With this initiative, NLM has taken a major new step in its mission to collect pertinent healthcare information of today for the benefit of research in the future. Increasingly, that information is found on the web, which is a rapidly changing environment where valuable and interesting materials can surface and then quickly disappear. The library is working to ensure it can effectively collect new material in a web environment and guarantee the material's permanence and availability to current and future patrons.

In launching this initiative, NLM joins many other national, state, and public libraries and archives that have acknowledged the importance of preserving web content for future generations. In addition to the Internet Archive, which has been broadly archiving the web since 1996, dozens of libraries and cultural heritage institutions have been engaged in thematic or event-based collecting. This community has contributed to the development and use of common tools, techniques, and standards that enable the creation of web archives. NLM has benefitted from this work and from local partners such as the Library of Congress, which is actively engaged in collecting and preserving web content.

The library has contracted with the Internet Archive to use its Archive-It service to collect web content. NLM staff use the service to specify web site titles, scope, depth, and frequency of collection. Currently the Health and Medicine Blogs collection resides at the Internet Archive, but in the future, NLM expects to permanently store all web collections in the NLM Digital Collections repository. The library also manages its own web domain and makes archived content available through its search function, as detailed at www.nlm.nih.gov/about/archives.html.

Source: National Library of Medicine