Themes discussed include Google Book Search, digitization efforts in libraries, Google Flu Trends, eBooks, iPhone, thumbnails, and zooming/panning interfaces. The blog has served as a vehicle for discussion of pictures, especially color pictures, in eBooks, including the copyright status of pictures in Google Book Search.

The first posting, Think Different : Pictures, gives a good overview of the subject. Other postings have been on digitization at NY Public Library, use of the word “pictures” instead of “images,” and Hardin MD Gallery Collections.

With the recent outbreak of Salmonella infection, the Hardin MD Salmonella Symptoms page has gotten heavy traffic from Google searches. Much of this traffic has come from people clicking the symptom label assigned by a group of Medical Library Association (MLA) librarians, who are a part of the Google Health Coop project. This is a cooperative effort by Google and medical websites, such as WebMD, AMA, Mayo Clinic, as well as MLA, to make health information more accessible.

… and 50+ countries around the world – Canada, UK, China, Spain, Turkey …

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[medical information, medical sites, medical websites, health info, hardinmd]

“Medical Libraries with a Public Good Focus — There are a number of medical school libraries that consciously fill a public good role. The Hardin Library for the Health Sciences at the University of Iowa has a very extensive site, Hardin MD (http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/hardin/md/index.html). The site is well maintained, and it links to some key resources in Spanish, medical illustrations, and hundreds of other medical library sites throughout the world.”

Here’s a Flickr picture of the citation and the page in Google Book search.

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[medical information, medical sites, medical websites, health info, hardinmd, medical pictures, common good, google books, google book search, medical libraries]

Dermochromes, by Jerome Kingsbury, pictures by Eduard Jacobi, 1914.
This book is in the Hardin Library collection, and images were specially scanned for use on Hardin MD pages. Pictures in Hardin MD are on Leprosy, Ringworm, and Lupus (the picture to the left). These realistic pictures were made in Germany using an unusual wax modeling technique.

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Thomas Addison’s book containing the first description of Addison’s Disease, 1855
This book is in the Hardin Library John Martin Rare Book Room, and images were scanned for placement in the University of Iowa Digital Library. They are also on Hardin MD pages.

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Atlas of diseases of the skin, Franz Mracek, 1899
Pictures in Hardin MD are of Psoriasis. These pictures are from the Google Books version, which was scanned at Harvard University

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It has been especially gratifying to make these pages available for Internet users because the pictures from these books are often highly ranked in Google Image search, and get heavy use from this. See for example, Google Image searches on lupus and addison’s disease.

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[medical pictures, medical books pictures, google books, google book search, free ebooks, e books, old books, medical images]

Over the last three years, close to 800 pictures on about 100 diseases/conditions have been added to the Hardin MD Medical Picture Gallery. The new Hardin MD home page makes these easy to find — Try it out!

We have recently begun applying the extensive tagging experience we have with Hardin MD to images from UIHC — See for example images from the Dermatology Department and the College of Dentistry.

If you have medical images that you would like to make accessible on the Web, contact eric-rumsey@uiowa.edu