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UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA HEALTH SCIENCES LIBRARY AWARDED NATIONAL LEADERSHIP GRANT

The University of Virginia Claude Moore Health Sciences Library has received a National Leadership grant of $250,000 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). Of the 50 institutions nationwide that were awarded grants, the U.Va. library was the only health sciences library to be chosen.

According to Linda Watson, director of the health sciences library, the grant will support a project to digitize and preserve 30,000 pages of manuscript material and 1,000 photographs from the Philip S. Hench Walter Reed Yellow Fever Collection on the World Wide Web. The project will provide a model for the integration of state-of-the-art, standards-compliant information technology and scholarly resources to make unique library resources more widely available.

Sharing this kind of rich archive with the world is an exciting prospect, but the grant also provides the resources to more fully explore the use of emerging standards for organizing and displaying electronic resources, Watson said. What we learn will help us further develop our digital directions in the new century.

The work of the U.S. Army Yellow Fever Commission of 1900-1901 is the core of the Philip S. Hench Walter Reed Yellow Fever Collection at U.Va. The Commission, headed by Major Walter Reed (1851-1902), an 1869 graduate of the University of Virginia School of Medicine, made a dramatic discovery and achieved a breakthrough in medicine for which Reed was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. At experimental stations just outside Havana, Major Walter Reed and the other members of the Yellow Fever Commission proved that the Aedes aegypti mosquito was the vector for the yellow fever virus.

The Philip S. Hench Walter Reed Yellow Fever Collection provides a unique resource of primary materials to support research in many areas of historical inquiry, Watson said. Some avenues for exploration using the collection include the history of medicine and science, social history, military history, biographical information on the principal players, the history of family and interpersonal relationships in the nineteenth century, tropical medicine and biomedical ethics.

National Leadership grants provide opportunities for libraries to address pressing needs in education, research and preservation, and for libraries and museums to work together to address community needs, expand audiences and implement the use of the most efficient and appropriate technologies, according to the IMLS. National Leadership Grant projects provide creative solutions to issues of national importance and provide leadership for other organizations to emulate.

Libraries and museums are more important than ever in this age of information, helping Americans navigate information resources and find meaning in an increasingly complex world, said Beverly Sheppard, acting director of IMLS. We are proud of these forward-thinking National Leadership projects that will increase access to information and help libraries and museums better serve the public. Examples of materials from the Philip S. Hench Walter Reed Yellow Fever Collection Please can be viewed in an online exhibit, The United States Army Yellow Fever Commission and the Spanish-American War: Science and Politics in Latin America, 1898-1904 (http://hsc.virginia.edu/hs-library/historical/yelfev/tabcon.html).

IMLS is a federal grant-making agency located in Washington, D.C. that fosters leadership, innovation and a lifetime of learning by supporting museums and libraries.

November 24, 1999