Pasteur’s Own Hand: The Creation of a Digital Repository

The Truman G. Blocker, Jr. History of Medicine Collections at the Moody Medical Library at the University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, Texas, was awarded a NN/LM South Central Region Digital Preservation & Access (DiPA) Award to complete a digital repository of carefully selected material from the private library of Louis Pasteur (1822-1895). This project sought to dramatically improve user awareness and access to the personal and academic thoughts of one of the world's most celebrated scientists. The Pasteur Collection held at the Blocker Collections contains 154 items including books, offprints, prints, manuscripts and unpublished handwritten letters by Pasteur which he maintained in his personal library. In a recent appraisal, the Pasteur Collection was noted as "easily the most significant in the United States and most likely the entire world outside of the material held by the [l'Institiut Pasteur] in France."

Our presentation will focus on the award application process and lessons learned, in-house workflows, outsourcing of translation and transcription, creation of audio files, website design, metadata creation, digital repository creation in ContentDM, and exporting of records from ContentDM for batch loading in our TDL repository.

This project has been funded in whole or in part with Federal funds from the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, under Contract No. HHSN-276-2011-00007-C with the Houston Academy of Medicine-Texas Medical Center Library.