A wide group of online resources was recently purchased by the University of Texas Digital Library with Academic Library Collection Enhancement Program (ALCEP) funds. The UT Board of Regents allocates ALCEP funds for one-time collection purchases to broaden the research and scholarly capabilities of the System’s fourteen institutions. The UT Southwestern Health Sciences Digital Library and Learning Center now offers online access to two history-centric resources through an ALCEP purchase: Texas County Histories and African American Historical Serials.
The Library now has perpetual access rights to Texas County Histories, a collection of more than 80 ebooks within Accessible Archives. Accessible Archives is a full-text, searchable database that includes serial publications such as newspapers and magazines, as well as books and county histories. Note: Other content within the Accessible Archives database is only available through September 2018.
Some of these ebooks also provide information on the history of medicine in Texas. The Encyclopedia of Texas, written in the 1920s, has a chapter on the history of the Texas medical profession, written by R. W. Knox, M.D., who had been a president of what is now known as the Texas Medical Association. Another chapter highlights Dallas as the medical center of the Southwest.
The other history-related resource of interest is African American Historical Serials, which is available through EBSCO. Developed in conjunction with the American Theological Library Association (ATLA) as an effort to preserve endangered serials related to African American religious life and culture, this database is a centralized and accessible digital resource of formerly fragmentary, widely-dispersed, and endangered materials originating from various institutions and sources, including some that had not previously participated in preservation projects. This collection documents the history of African American life and religious organizations from materials published between 1816 through 1922.
Some of the online materials within this resource that chronicle the history of medicine include the Report of the State Hospital at Goldsboro, North Carolina, which covers every other year between 1902 to 1916, and the Annual Report of the Lincoln Hospital & Home, which covers some of the years between 1915 and 1922. These reports provide images of hospital buildings, department staffing, statistics on patient stays, local medical advertisements, and more.