We are requesting a three-year grant in the amount of $490,359.00 to allow the Ohio Network of Medical History Collections, a consortium representing the medical historical collections associated with seven Ohio academic health sciences institutions, primarily libraries, to do on-line cataloguing of approximately 50,000 artifacts in their collections. These artifacts represent a major resource for the history of medicine, at present accessible only through card catalogues maintained separately by - each institution. We want to improve and extend the utilization of this important resource, and propose to do this with the use of Machine Readable Cataloguing (MARC for three-dimensional objects, the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, second edition (AACR2), the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) of the National Library of Medicine, and the bibliographic utility of the On-Line Computer Library Center (OCLC). This will be the first large-scale implementation of MARC for artifacts, although it has been tested and our consortium has developed a satisfactory workform. The national accessibility to information made possible by OCLC and enhanced by the gateways being developed between systems will create networking that has heretofore eluded artifact collections, thus providing information access for users never before possible. In addition to the extension of user information in medical history, this project will encourage other health sciences institutions with artifacts to follow suit, further expanding information access. It also has the potential to demonstrate that a proven library methodology is applicable to museums where there are no nationally agreed upon methods for cataloguing or for networking. Potential users will be alerted to this new availability of information through libraries, newsletters, and journals. A manual cataloguers will be issued. Our primary need is staffing to do the cataloguing for the 50,000 artifacts.
