web resources

The ICOM subcommitte on University Museums and Collections (UMAC) has set up a moderated list to facilitate exhange of information between university museums. The list is open also to non-UMAC members. See more here — for subscription, go to: https://listes.u-strasbg.fr/sympa/unistra.fr/info/umac-ml

Like most other kinds of historical artefacts, medical objects from the past are scattered all over. Some are safely deposited in museums, small or large; others are in private collections; others again are circulating between private collectors, mediated by eBay and other auction services (and some, especially plastic objects from contemporary medicine, are contributing to […]

I performed my fist knee operation today. Not in real life though but on my pc. Videogames inspired by medical practises or diseases has been discussed on this blog before but I don’t think that this particular game has been mentioned. In the game one takes on the role of a surgeon (or a surgeon’s […]

As some of you may have noticed, the online Image & Video Library of The American Society for Cell Biology has been closed since February, and nobody knew whether it would be opened again. Last Thursday the ACSB announced, however, that the site will be re-opened and developed further by means of a $2,5 million […]

A few weeks ago I attended the Science Online London 2009 conference – a conference on science communication in the new era of “the Web”. As they wrote on the conference homepage: The Web is rapidly changing the communication, practice and culture of science. Science online London 2009 will explore the latest trends in science […]

There are several kinds of cooperations between sci-med-tech museums, and I’m not particularly critical of any of them (except one). But I’m nevertheless waiting for someone to take the initiative to a SciMedTechMusGang. I’m thinking of something analogous to the BioGang — “an informal, distributed collection of geeky life scientists who have come together to try and think of cool […]

As a comment to the current weeding out of physical copies of scientific journals in many libraries around the world (because more and more older journal series are put online), Karen Reeds points out (in a recent comment on the H-SCI-TECH-MED list, #105, 2009) that there are good reasons to save the actual physical copies […]

There has been rather scarce posting on this site for the last couple of weeks. Several of us are extremely busy preparing the new exhibition, Split and Splice, which will open on Friday, 11 June, in our main building — hopefully, we will be able to come back with a few appetisers in the next […]

Sonia Horn, current Director of Collections at the Medical University of Vienna, has recently announced on different email-lists that the collection of specimens from the university’s Department of Forensic Medicine has now been catalogued and digitised in its entirety. Great initiative! But I also noticed that for “ethical reasons” they will not make the collection available on the web; they only give researchers access. […]

My good friend and colleague Jim Edmonson (who is Head of the great Dittrick Medical History Center and Museum at Case Western University in Cleveland, Ohio) sent me and some of his other colleagues an email the other day. Jim tells the story about how one of his friends, an obstetrician and collector of obstetric and gynaecological instruments, has recently been in […]

I had a medical museum curator’s nightmare early this morning. Last night I read that Galaxy Zoo expects 1 million visitors on their site to help classify galaxies during the next 100 hours. “Completing this challenge will not only be another significant step towards our goal of producing the world’s largest and most detailed catalogue of classified galaxies, but […]

The Director’s office of Medical Museion at the University of Copenhagen announced today that the museum will put all its collections on Twitter. Hundreds of thousands of material artefacts (from electron microscopes to conjoined twins in pickles), tens of thousands of medical historical images, and hundreds of shelf meters of archival documents will be compressed, catalogued and publicly communicated in the Twitter […]