The Truman G. Blocker, Jr. History of Medicine Collections and the Moody Medical Library are the 2014 recipients of the Texas Digital Library Trailblazer Award, which honors the work of individuals or groups at Texas academic libraries who have created, maintained or supported digital collections in innovative ways.
The award honors the library’s creation of the digital
Louis Pasteur Collection which contains original handwritten letters from the French scientist Louis Pasteur in addition to other unique and rare items. This valuable but previously underutilized set of materials is now openly accessible online and has attracted international interest for the Louis Pasteur Collection, as well as for other items in the Blocker Collections.
The Louis Pasteur Collection project team - Robert Marlin, Mira Greene, Lisa Reyna-Guerrero and Kelly Caldwell - were honored on April 28 at the
Texas Conference on Digital Libraries in Austin.
As part of the project, the team digitized 22 unique items and translated 12 handwritten letters into English. These items, as well as a bibliography of secondary resources and information about other physical items in the collection, are available on the
Blocker Collections website. This website represents the only online repository available for public access of original Pasteur letters accompanied by their English translations.
The TDL Awards are designed to recognize outstanding digital library work at academic libraries throughout Texas and are awarded by the Texas Digital Library, a consortium of academic libraries that provides a shared technology infrastructure for making the riches of Texas higher education institutions more widely available online.