Hannah Swan, Lucas Richert (UW-Madison, School of Pharmacy), "Pharmacy History in the
Twenty-First Century: Modernizing the Edward Kremers Research Library and Archive”
This presentation will summarize the activities and findings of a 3-year National
Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)-funded project, “Accessing the History of Health,
Pharmacy, and Medicines,” which focuses on the archival collections of the Edward Kremers
Research Library and Archive, held jointly by the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy
(AIHP) and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Pharmacy. The collection was begun
in the 1890s by Edward Kremers, who served as the second director of the University of
Wisconsin-Madison School of Pharmacy and pioneered the four-year curriculum for pharmacy
schools, and continued to grow throughout the twentieth century under the auspices of the
AIHP. The archive documents pharmacy and pharmaceutical history through photographs,
advertisements, trade catalogs, correspondence, and more. The current grant project centers
on increasing the accessibility of the collections through the processing of five hundred file
drawers of print and archival materials, the digitization of historical pharmacy artifacts and
ephemera and accompanying implementation of a digital library, and the creation of online
exhibitions featuring materials from the collection. This talk will feature highlights from the
collections that are being processed, illustrated richly with images of pharmacy history from the
mid-nineteenth century forward, while also touching on the complexities of reclassifying and
digitizing an ephemera-based collection. We will conclude with a look ahead at the third and
final year of the grant work and what the future holds for these collections.
Date
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