Collections: Archives & Modern Manuscripts

Collection Description

The Archives and Modern Manuscripts Collection consists of personal papers and organizational records in all formats which document predominantly 20th and 21st century American medical practitioners, biomedical scientists, public health practitioners and researchers and health policy planners. Subject strengths of the Collection include public health and health policy, mental health, child development, and molecular biology. Notable collections include personal papers of former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, and the papers of Nobel Prize-winning scientists, particularly those connected with NIH. The Collection also contains significant holdings of bound and folio manuscripts dating between the 17th-19th centuries, largely of European origin, that include student lecture notes, recipe books, diaries, physician's ledgers, pharmacist formularies and account books, and medical treatises and commentaries. The Collection also manages selected internal records of NLM and other organizations relating to medical librarianship and medical informatics.

While we selectively collect the papers of significant NIH scientists and some institutional records, most permanent records of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and its Institutes are found in the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

History of the Archives & Modern Manuscripts Collection

The NLM manuscripts collection began in the 19th century as a collection of incidental manuscript items, chiefly relating to American medicine and public health. By the middle of the 20th century, the collection had grown to include a significant number of Western and Islamic medical manuscripts. A distinct modern manuscripts collection, materials dating from the 1600s to the present, was established in 1962. By 1965 the Library had hired its first Curator of Modern Manuscripts and began actively soliciting donations of personal papers and society records. By 1976 holdings included 236 processed collections, which grew to over a thousand collections by 1999, comprising about 6,000 linear feet of cataloged materials. As information technology proliferated archivists began both expanding the formats of materials they collected and preserved and began to improve access to existing collections by digitizing physical original materials and making them available on the web. Since 1998, the Digital Manuscripts Program, a team of archivists, digital archivists, and historians, has been digitizing and making available online selected archival and manuscript material through the Profiles in Science website. In 2011 archivists began to systematically collect born digital materials from the web and social media and to build capacity to capture this content, which will likely be as important to future researchers as their analog counterparts of the past.