NLM Staff Dr. Stephen J. Greenberg and Web Collecting and Archiving Working Group Honored by the Archivists and Librarians in the History of the Health Sciences (ALHHS)

On May 10, 2018, the professional association Archivists and Librarians in the History of the Health Sciences (ALHHS) recognized NLM staff with two prestigious awards.

Stephen J. Greenberg, MSLS, PhD, Head of the NLM Rare Books and Early Manuscripts section received the 2018 Lisabeth M. Holloway Award for his significant contributions through leadership and service to ALHHS and to the profession.

ALHHS also awarded the NLM Web Collecting and Archiving Working Group—including Delia Golden, MS/LIS; Christie Moffatt, MLIS; John Rees, MA, MLS; and Kristina Womack, MA, MLS—its 2018 Publication Award in the category of “Electronic Resource” for the NLM HIV/AIDS Web Archive Collection.

About Stephen J. Greenberg, MSLS, PhD

Stephen J. Greenberg, MSLS, PhD

Since joining the staff of the National Library of Medicine’s History of Medicine Division in 1992, and becoming a member of ALHHS the same year, Dr. Greenberg has demonstrated superior public service now recognized with the prestigious ALHHS Holloway Award.

Dr. Greenberg has an impressive record of service with both ALHHS and NLM, including service as the ALHHS president from 2010 to 2012 and his current position as Head of the Rare Books and Early Manuscripts Section in the NLM History of Medicine Division. During his twenty-five years with the NLM, Dr. Greenberg has authored several important historical articles based on NLM collections, including a noteworthy 2009 article, co-authored with Patricia E Gallagher, entitled “The Great Contribution: Index Medicus, Index-Catalogue, IndexCat” (Journal of the Medical Library Association 97:2 (April, 2009), 108-13). Here, years ahead of others in the field of digital humanities, Dr. Greenberg recognized the importance of pursuing a quantitative analysis of the Library’s longstanding, systematic indexing of the medical literature, an effort which William Henry Welch considered to be “America’s greatest contribution to medical knowledge.” In 2014, Dr. Greenberg’s scholarly achievement in this area contributed fundamentally to NLM releasing the extensible markup language (XML) for IndexCat data, thus opening a new era of research in this dataset. In effect, Dr. Greenberg’s scholarship both predicted and provided the fundamental basis for the new trajectory of the Division in the current era of data science and digital humanities.

About the NLM Web Collecting and Archiving Working Group

The NLM Web Collecting and Archiving Working Group

Left to right: Christie Moffatt, MLIS; Delia Golden, MS/LIS; John Rees, MA, MLS; Kristina Womack, MA, MLS.

In 2016–2017—as part of its longstanding commitment to collect and preserve the history of HIV/AIDS—NLM developed and made public via Archive-It a new and remarkably rich electronic archival collection, consisting of websites and social media documenting HIV/AIDS in the early twenty-first century.

The NLM Web Collecting and Archiving Working Group—a dynamic and talented team of archivists, historians, and librarians—identified, collected, and described a wide range of web sites and social media on biomedical, clinical, cultural, and social aspects of HIV/AIDS. They curated this resource thematically around several important themes: HIV treatment, HIV prevention, biomedical research on HIV/AIDS, clinical care for HIV patients, living with HIV, and social-cultural responses to HIV/AIDS. And thanks to the energy and dedication of the group, the collection they have developed is equally rich in terms of its organizational representation, encompassing websites of U.S. federal agencies, state public health HIV/AIDS departments, community organizations, international clinical trial and vaccine research sites, non-governmental organizations, advocacy groups, and a wide array of social media, including blogs, YouTube videos, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, and more. Future researchers of our digital age will certainly appreciate this collection, as well as the fine knowledge, skills, and abilities of the team who had the foresight to envision it, create it, and make it publicly available for the greater good.

The NLM announced this collection publicly on December 1, 2017, in honor of World AIDS Day, through a post authored by historian Christine Wenc, MA, which appeared on the NLM History of Medicine Division’s popular blog Circulating Now.

The ALHHS is an association established exclusively for educational purposes to serve the professional interests of librarians, archivists, and other specialists actively engaged in the librarianship of the history of the health sciences, by promoting the exchange of information and by improving standards of service.