The Opportunities of Engagement: Working with Scholars to Improve Description and Access at the Center for the History of Medicine

Abstract

The Center for the History of Medicine has used its two CLIR-funded grant initiatives to engage researchers at all stages of their professional careers in an effort to understand how archival description can be improved or modified to the benefit of scholars while remaining attentive to workflows that speed processing. This paper considers findings from the Center’s “Foundations of Public Health Policy” (2008) and “Private Practices, Public Health: Privacy-Aware Processing to Maximize Access to Health Collections” (2012) initiatives.