Harvard University
The Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine is one of the largest medical libraries in the world. Countway holds more than 630,000 volumes and subscribes to over 3,500 current journal titles.
Countway serves the Harvard Medical School (HMS), Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard School of Dental Medicine, Boston Medical Library, and the Massachusetts Medical Society.
Countway houses the Center for the History of Medicine, the Brigham and Women's Hospital Archives, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Archives, and the Warren Anatomical Museum.
The Boston Medical Library (BML) is a physicians' non-profit organization. In 1960, the BML and the HMS Library entered into an agreement to combine their collections and administration. This agreement lead to the creation of The Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine.
Mission Statement
The mission of the Countway Library is to cultivate and advance education, research, scholarship and professional growth in the health and biomedical sciences by facilitating access to scholarly information and knowledge, preserving a historical record, and creating a stimulating and synergistic setting for intellectual growth.
Bridging the Research Divide: Rethinking Long-Term Value and Access for Historical and Contemporary Maternal, Infant, and Child Research Data (2015) is the Center’s third Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives grant award, and one of only nineteen projects funded by CLIR as part of the program’s final round of awards. Previous initiatives include Foundations of Public Health Policy (2008) and Private Practices, Public Health: Privacy-Aware Processing to Maximize Access to Health Collections (2012).Center News about the Project