web resources

Another highly influential buzz-phrase in contemporary medical discourse is ‘evidence based medicine’ (EBM). Many medical people believe this is a fairly recent step in the history of medical progress; historians on the other hand have questioned the novelty of the phenomenon and pointed to its long durée and that evidence based (i.e., empirical) medical practice is in principle going back all the way to […]

MuseumBlogs.org is a directory of (at present 98) museum and museum-related blogs. The majority of the posts are from the RSS feeds of the blogs listed in the directory (we don’t yet, but Benny will soon help us install the function). The site was developed by Ideum, a small design company that develops interactive exhibits and websites for […]

Google (who else?) have just launched the beta version of Patent Search. The database currently contains all approx. 7 million US patents from 1790s to mid-2006 — and will be continuously updated and expanded to cover a number of non-US patent offices as well. Read more about it here. Needless to say this is a potentially […]

Every historian’s/curator’s wet dream is to find the door to a forgotten attic with all sorts of so far unseen historical documents and artefacts. This is what two former staff members at the Willard Psychiatric Center in New York State and a New York State Museum curator did in 1995 when they opened a hidden door to an […]

Take a look at the brand new Journal of Visualized Experiments which wants to publish video films of experimental work to help apply laboratory protocols. The “YouTube for test tubes”, as news (at) nature writes. The editors’ explicit aim is to help researchers reproduce biomedical experimental procedures, but it certainly has museological applications as well. These videos is a reminder […]

Apropos the recent debate about the reliability of Wikipedia — take a look at the Uncyclopedia which already has about 175 articles on science (including a very instructive one on “intelligent rotation”). The Uncyclopedia is perhaps not as subtle as The Onion, but with a little help from its friends it could be turned into […]

I cannot really explain why I’m so fascinated with this eight-minute animation of molecular mechanisms within the cell? “The Inner Life of a Cell” was created for Harvard University biology students by XVIVO, a scientific animation company. Turn off the accompanying music-hall piano sound and enjoy the “slithering, gliding and twisting through 3D space”. There […]

Intute, the internet service for education and research created by a consortium of UK universities, has just launched a very useful tutorial for historians to the internet. It is primarily written for general historians in the UK, but the general advices and the topics chosen can easily be transferred to other national contexts and to, […]

Another on-line exhibition — “Visible Proofs – Forensic Views of the Body” — produced by the National Library of Medicine is much more impressive. It is almost as reluctant to use hyperlinks as “From ‘Monsters’¨to Modern Medical Miracles” (see my earlier review here), but the curators have made some serious efforts to use the web-medium […]

The National Library of Medicine has just launched an on-line exhibiton about conjoined (‘Siamese’) twins called “From ‘Monsters’ to Modern Medical Miracles“. It contains a number of fine images from the 15h century to the present, with short accompanying texts, based on a careful selection of the most autoritative primary and secondary sources. Yet I’m […]

I hate spam! And so do billions of e-mail and web users. Most of it is (rather harmless) advertising for viagra, porn movies or on-line poker games. Nevertheless it fills the mailbox and complicates making blog comments. That’s why almost everybody, including Bill Gates, hates it. But as Gustav Holmberg (in the Research Policy Institute […]

Phoenix Arts Association have been awarded a grant from The Wellcome Trust for artist Anna Dumitriu to work on a project about allergy entitled “Sensitive”: “The project is transdisciplinary and crosses the boundary between art and science enabling a greater understanding of allergy through scientific research and innovative art techniques (such as live art, video […]