2014 Annual Meeting Presentations

Illustrating the History of Medicine Slides as PDF
Eric Boyle, National Museum of Health and Medicine

For decades, a collection of hundreds of medical illustrations lay crammed in boxes on the shelves of the National Museum of Health and Medicine.  With no finding aid, and only a cursory description in the Museum’s Guide to Collections, only a handful of Museum staff members knew about the works of art these boxes contained.  As part of the STHC roundtable, Eric Boyle will speak about the challenges associated with processing the collection, while surveying the practical value of the illustrations and the many subjects depicted. 

Eric Boyle earned his Ph.D. in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine from the University of California Santa Barbara in 2007.  From 2007 to 2008, he worked as Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s History of Medicine program.  He then completed a postdoctoral fellowship with the Office of History at the National Institutes of Health from 2008 to 2011, where he conducted research on his current book project titled, In the Belly of the Beast: A History of Complementary and Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health.  In 2012, he joined the staff of the National Museum of Health and Medicine as an Archives Technician, and in 2013, he became Chief Archivist of the Otis Historical Archives at the museum.  He also a Lecturer at the University of Maryland, and his first book, Quack Medicine: Combating Health Fraud in Twentieth-Century America, was published last year

Cutting Edge: Combining Access and Best Practice in a Large Medical Collection Slides as PDF
Ashley L. Taylor, University of Pittsburgh

After acquiring the papers of Dr. Thomas Starzl, a pioneering transplant surgeon whose career began in the 1950s and continues to the present day, the University of Pittsburgh Archives Service Center was confronted with its first large-scale collection from a medical researcher. The aim of this presentation is to discuss how archivist Ashley Taylor tackled the 328 linear-foot collection, including the challenges of crafting an access policy that would apply to this and to potential future healthcare collections.
Ashley L. Taylor is the Arlen Specter Project Archivist at the Archives Service Center at the University of Pittsburgh. A 2010 graduate of Pitt’s MLIS program, Ashley has worked at the ASC since 2009; she was first a graduate student assistant, and then hired as the project archivist in charge of the papers of Dr. Thomas Starzl. Before coming to Pennsylvania, she worked as a Manuscript Processor at the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland, Ohio. Ashley is an active member of both the Society of American Archivists and the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference. She is currently pursuing her Digital Archives Specialist certification through SAA.

Digital Preservation, Mobile Access, and Interdisciplinary Collaboration Slides as PDF
Heather Yager, California Academy of Sciences

This presentation will focus on methods of collaboration between archival practitioners, research scientists, and information technology professionals, with the goal of creating contextualized linked data that can enrich digital access to archival collections.  Findings from the IMLS National Leadership Grant “Connecting Content: A Collaboration to Link Field Notes to Specimens and Published Literature” will be presented alongside case studies in still and moving image digitization from the California Academy of Sciences.
Heather Yager specializes in digital archives and the history of the natural sciences.  Now in her eighth year in the archives profession, Heather has built Linux servers at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, co-founded the digital repository program at the Computer History Museum, and is currently managing the archives at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, CA.  When not working in the archives, she can usually be found playing the piano.

Acquiring the founding documents of Silicon Valley Slides as PDF
Paula Jabloner, Computer History Museum

In 2012, the Computer History Museum acquired the Fairchild Semiconductor Patent Notebooks containing the world-changing inventions of Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, who went on to found Intel.  Paula Jabloner will talk briefly on the processing, donation, and outreach efforts for this collection.
Paula has more than twenty years of experience with archival and museum collections in a variety of organizations. She is currently guiding an innovative partnership between the Computer History Museum and Cisco to establish a Cisco corporate archives. Previously she was Director of Collections and Senior Archivist at the Museum. Prior to the Museum, she was Project Director for Silicon Valley History Online. She has been an archivist at History San Jose and the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, and was the American Civil Liberties Union Project Archivist at Princeton University