Tami Blog #6: The MacKinney Collection of Medieval Medical Illustrations

The MacKinney Collection of Medieval Medical Illustrations is one of the more recent collections to be digitized and added to the online library collections at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Collection Principles

Dr. Loren MacKinney, a professor of medieval studies at the university, was an avid collector of Ektachrome slides pertaining to medieval medical illustrations, traveling worldwide to add to his collection. In addition to the slides, this exhibit provides extensive information concerning the life of Dr. MacKinney and the process used to digitize the slides. This digitized collection is a subset of the larger MacKinney Collection, consisting mostly of microfilm and Photostats chiefly of medieval medical manuscripts, as well as MacKinney’s extensive research notes on medieval medicine, medieval medical illustrations, and related topics, housed at the university. Given the uniqueness of the slides and their potential for damage, they were digitized from June to August 2007.

Object Characteristics

The slides were digitized using the Nikon SuperCool SCU 9000. To create a master archive of the images at the highest resolution possible, the slides were scanned five at a time at 4000 pixels per inch. Copies of these images were then sharpened, cropped, and color adjusted in Photoshop. These manipulations sought to represent accurately the condition of the original slide and to produce a natural appearance for screen-viewing.

The objects can be manipulated and zoomed in to a level of extreme detail. You can also add items to your “My Favorites” folder and then do side-by-side comparisons of two objects. The images can also be viewed in a slideshow. However, when viewed in this state, the user must choose between viewing the image and viewing the metadata pertaining to the object.

Metadata

This collection provides the best metadata I have come across while looking at different digitized collections for this assignment. From the home page, you can search by illustrator, repository, date, language, subject, text illustrated or you can view the entire collection. Once you click on an image, underneath is a list of metadata concerning the image, including where it can be found in the repository. One of the things I really liked about this site was that when you clicked on the image to enlarge it, the metadata remained. In other collections I have explored this semester, many tossed you into a separate window that held only the enlarged image with no supporting data. Very inefficient to have to go back and forth from metadata screen to image screen.

Intended Audience

The university states in its discourse concerning the collection that the collection was digitized in order to “benefit scholars by providing easy access to the images.” I also believe this collection would be interesting to the general public. I don’t consider myself particularly scholarly and I enjoyed searching and browsing the collection with no real purpose in mind.