Innovation and Collaboration at the National Library of Medicine: Migrating Profiles in Science to a New Digital Platform for Development, Preservation, and Public Access

Abstract

ABSTRACT Challenges abound to establish platforms to curate, store, and provide public access to digitized historical archives. Even more challenging is leveraging a twentieth century platform to achieve these goals in the twenty-first century. Combining best practices and expertise in archival science, librarianship, and information technology, staff faced such a challenge at the National Library of Medicine (NLM) to leverage a digital library system and delivery website, Profiles in Science, created in the early 1990s to serve researchers, educators, and students more meaningfully and impactfully as they continue to use this resource to learn about the modern history of science, medicine, and public health in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This case study describes a data migration project that began as an organic, internally developed process with a fundamental goal to migrate legacy content into NLM's digital repository infrastructure for management and presentation of content. This project grew to encompass the constellation of software platforms needed to support an integrated digital library offering. Experience in this project testifies to the value of teamwork dedicated to public service and offers inspiration to colleagues who are facing similar challenges with leveraging long-established platforms to become more dynamic, responsive, and impactful resources.