Graphical Materials Online

The highly graphical nature of the World Wide Web (WWW) makes it well suited for scanning, sorting, and cross-referencing all forms of archival materials in media other than print. Graphical resources demonstrate most compellingly the mind-stretching power of the Web for historians. While textual materials are probably most important to scholars setting out on a historical investigation, graphical resources are enormously useful both in the presentation of research findings and in teaching.

Graphical material can be downloaded through a variety of services. Most readers in the United States are familiar with several commercial online services that predate the Web: the so-called pay-per-view services, whose leading exponents at this moment are America OnLine^® (AOL), the Compuserve^® Information Service (CIS), and Prodigy^®. These older services are well established and easy to set up, and they impose costs roughly equivalent to those of the newer Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that specialize in the Web. AOL is, at this writing, the largest and easiest to navigate. CIS is the pay-per-view service thought by many to offer the most material, both textual and graphical. Specialized (including historical and technological) graphical materials are particularly well represented in CIS, although none of the materials is explicitly medical.

At the time of this writing (December 1996), the World Wide Web threatens to supplant all these services. It is difficult to predict the sustained utility (and solvency) of the older commercial services by the time Bulletin readers see this column—if they survive, they will probably remain important tools for the historian who wants to locate and deploy graphical materials.

CIS offers at least the following three graphical “forums” of particular interest to historians: Archive Photographs, Fine Art, and the Bettmann Archive. ¹ A simple but sophisticated “find” function, accessible in a number of different ways (including a toolbar button and menu choice), allows the reader to locate any one of tens of thousands of images in these repositories. Many can be downloaded and used in teaching; for publication, CIS provides a means of obtaining permission, when necessary, to reprint the illustration. What is enormously compelling about these materials is their ability to be discovered, like the proverbial needle, and then manipulated. (In fact, tools are being developed to search across multiple databases.) A search, for example, for “Pasteur” in the CIS Archival Photo repository yields a single, highly usable “hit” from 1895, the year of his death. Such graphics, usually of modest file size (in this case a little over 80K), can then be simply dropped into a presentation graphics program such as Microsoft PowerPoint^®. From there they can be interlaced with textual and other graphical data and then easily used for teaching and the presentation of research before an audience. ²

Websites can afford to be more focused than the broad-based pay-per-view services: it’s here that we should find graphical repositories of exclusively medico-historical interest. Because the WWW is itself so graphically rich and hypertext-enhanced, the ideal medical history website should offer appropriate search engines, which are tools for performing both simple and even complex (Boolean) searches across their underlying databases. The resulting displays should include thumbnail-size renderings of the pictorial elements, or “hits,” that comply with the search just performed. And such websites are emerging.

The mother of all graphical medical history websites is the National Library of Medicine’s Online Images database, which contains almost 60,000 images, all of them searchable and downloadable. ³ In developing this archive, which migrated from laserdisk to the Web a few years ago, the NLM staff chose a highly conservative copyright authentication policy. The result is that a very large number of its images, including many whose copyright was the least bit in question, are diagonally striped to discourage infringement. While this measure is no doubt justifiable, it somewhat limits the usefulness of these items. This database is nonetheless remarkable for its breadth and depth.

A lesser-known and smaller NLM database grew out of an exposition at the Library and covers the Library’s collection of medical and pharmaceutical ephemera...