The above image of medical students at their microscopes is one of hundreds in the UT Southwestern Library archives. (Photo courtesy of UT Southwestern Medical Center Library.)

– A photograph of tent facilities for sick soldiers during the 1918 influenza epidemic.

– A portrait of the first five African American doctors admitted to practice at St. Paul Hospital (or to any Dallas hospital staff) in 1943.

– An image of the first open-heart surgery performed in Dallas, at Parkland Hospital in 1956.

These images, and hundreds of others housed in the collections at UT Southwestern Medical Center Library, document the history of medicine in Dallas. Up to now, the images have only been available to researchers and patrons who visit the library’s physical facilities, but thanks to a grant from the National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NN/LM), the photographs will soon be available online.

TDL DSpace as Preservation Tool

The Library received a $25,000 Historic Preservation and Digitization Award from the NN/LM South Central Region to create a digital photo repository entitled Dallas Medical Images, 1890-1975. While the images will be made publicly available through CONTENTdm, UT Southwestern Medical Center is using its Texas Digital Library DSpace repository as a preservation tool for the collection, fulfilling a key component of the grant application and the goals of the project.

According to Matt Zimmerman, principal investigator for the Dallas Medical History 1890-1975  project, the Library has several goals: (1) to make the images more widely accessible by getting them online, (2) to promote the wider holdings of the UT Southwestern Medical Center Library, and (3) to preserve the images digitally

“CONTENTdm is the public face,” says Zimmerman, “but the other important goal is long-term storage and preservation. Without having the DSpace repository and the upcoming Preservation Network behind it, we wouldn’t be able to do the preservation part of the project.”

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