web resources

Only a few years ago most bloggers were happy, omnivorous amateurs who wrote about anything that happened to pass by their computer screens. Now more and more professionals are discovering the networking powers of the medium. I’m particularly intrigued by the rapid emergence of blogs from all over the medical world—it’s like a prairie fire! Consider, for example, this list of blogs by surgeons […]

The genre of medical blogs grows incessantly, and it’s difficult to keep up with all exciting new quality start-ups. So I have to restrict mention to those that may have some medical museum relevance. Yesterday I fell over The Sterile Eye: Life, death and surgery through a lens, edited by medical videographer Øystein Horgmo at the Norwegian National […]

As I wrote earlier today, the 2008 Wellcome Image Awards (formerly the Biomedical Image Awards) have been announced. 22 dazzling, advanced-tech produced, coloured images of tissues, cells and molecular models were put on display in the Wellcome Collection foyer yesterday and have also been laid out on their website for the public eye to admire. The top of the biomedical image pops? Or […]

This year’s Wellcome Image Awards were announced Tuesday night. The 22 images chosen by a jury from the huge collection in the Wellcome Library’s image repository (Wellcome Images) will be shown in the Wellcome Collection foyer at 183 Euston Rd., London, until some time this summer—and then at the leading Japanese science center, Miraikan (The National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation) in […]

Should this blog change its name to ‘Biomedicine on Omeka’? Maybe not literally, but the newly released web-exhibition platform Omeka (a Swahili word meaning “to display goods or wares”) provides food for thought and imagination.   Omeka is developed by the George Mason University Center for History and New Media, whose Director, Dan Cohen, describes it as a “WordPress for your exhibits and collections”. The Omeka platform […]

I’ve just received an incoming link from a newly founded medical museum blog called ‘A Repository for Bottled Monsters‘, edited by Mike Rhode, chief archivist of the Otis Historical Archives which is one of collecting divisions of the National Museum of Health and Medicine in the northern suburbs of Washington DC: The title emanates from one of NMHM’s former curator-pathologists who wished to avoid […]

I’ve just stumbled upon The Museum Detective, a website/blog dedicated to finding stories “from behind the scenes of the museum world”, edited by museum advisor/consultant Joanna Cobley in Christchurch, NZ. Particularly noteworthy is the large number of posts with podcasts. For example this interview with Conal McCarthy, Director of the Museums and Heritage Studies programme at […]

Mia Ridge, a database developer for the Museum of London, asks some interesting questions on her blog Open Objects about how museums and cultural heritage institutions relate to the ‘participatory web’ (web 2.0, social networking sites, user-generated content etc). Mia’s (perhaps not very unsurprising) impression from speaking with colleagues is that museums are pretty conservative in this respect. But […]

I was just reminded by Nick Hopwood on an email-list that the Wellcome Trust has quite recently introduced a more generous policy for the free use of Wellcome Images. The reproduction price is now waived for a wide range of non-commercial uses. See the terms here. The large majority of the >100,000 (!) online items in the digital image database are classical medical history pictures. […]

The Harvard University Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments (CHSI) has just opened its Waywiser website. As of today it only contains 764 records out of the total of 20,000 objects in the collection, but the database is growing with a few hundred records every month; CHSI Director Peter Galison says (in a circulated email on Mersenne) that they will also add films and archival material […]

Is there a point in making a medical museum like ours part of an ‘internet of things’ — i.e., a global network of miniaturised sensors and radio transmitters attached to physical things, thus connecting the material world to the digital internet? The rapid technological development invites to leaps of museological imagination. RFID-tags and barcodes open up for a seamless connection between museum showcases/storerooms and internet sites. Just a […]

Speaking about biomedical animation and displays: iMed Studios have also just released this 2 min. holiday greeting promotional video which is useful New Year’s fuel for imagining how biomedical animations could be incorporated in future medical museum settings. For example, I like the holographic display of the heart model. Maybe this could be done as augmented reality (see earlier post here) as well? It’s also […]