NLM and National Endowment for the Humanities Reaffirm Cooperation on Initiatives of Common Interest

The National Library of Medicine (NLM), the world's largest medical library and a component of the National Institutes of Health, and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) have reaffirmed their partnership, originally established in 2012, following on the visit of NEH Chairman William D. Adams to the NLM. The agencies will continue to develop initiatives that bring together specialists from the humanities, medicine, and information sciences to share expertise and develop new research agendas.

During the past three years, NLM and NEH have collaborated on several initiatives in cooperation with a number of organizations and institutions, including the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities of the University of Maryland, Research Councils UK, Virginia Tech, The Wellcome Library, and The Wellcome Trust.

NLM and NEH collaborations have included involvement in the 2013 symposium Shared Horizons: Data, Biomedicine, and the Digital Humanities, which explored the intersection of digital humanities and biomedicine, and the 2013 symposium An Epidemiology of Information: New Methods for Interpreting Disease and Data, which explored new methods for large-scale data analysis of epidemic disease. In April 2016, NLM will host the NEH-funded, interdisciplinary workshop Images and Texts in Medical History: An Introduction to Methods, Tools, and Data from the Digital Humanities. A unique public forum involving hands-on instruction and sessions open to the public, the workshop will provide historians of medicine and interested others with an opportunity to learn about tools, methods, and texts in the digital humanities that can inform research, teaching, scholarship, and public policy. Participation in Images and Texts in Medical History will be free to those workshop attendees who apply and are accepted to attend. Members of the public are welcome to attend the open sessions.

Registration details for Images and Texts in Medical History are now available at www.medicalhistworkshop.org. The deadline for applications is Wednesday, September 30, 2015.

Moving forward, NLM and NEH will continue their work together to:

• encourage humanities, biomedical, and cultural heritage scholarship and research of high quality;
• foster collegial interaction between scholars, scientists, librarians, archivists, curators, technical information specialists, healthcare professionals, cultural heritage professionals, and others in the humanities and biomedical communities; and
• demonstrate their commitment to collaboration in the delivery of innovative resources for the research and education communities.

About the partner institutions:

Celebrating its 50^th anniversary in 2015 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at: www.neh.gov