printable versionLane Medical Library marks century of scholarship and service
The old library
Lane Medical Library was established in 1906 as part of Cooper Medical College in San Francisco. Stanford acquired the school in 1908, and the library was officially dedicated in 1912 when it moved from the med school building on the corner of Sacramento and Webster streets to a building (above) across the way, now the library of the California Pacific Medical Center.
Lane Medical Library is celebrating its 100th birthday with an appreciative look at medicine's past and an open house offering glimpses of the library's future.
The open house, Friday, 2-5 p.m., will feature brief remarks from Dean Philip Pizzo, MD, and other speakers, starting at 2:30. The festivities will also include refreshments, showings of videotaped recollections of Lane from medical school alumni, including faculty members Larry Mathers, MD, PhD; Fernando Mendoza, MD, and Irving Weissman, MD, and the chance to record your own recollections.
The library, one of the oldest medical libraries in the West, was established in San Francisco in 1906 as the library for Stanford medical school's predecessor, Cooper Medical College. The school's directors named it after co-founder Levi Cooper Lane, MD, whose wife endowed it.
The directors were committed to building a great medical library. As early as 1907, with the arrival of books and journals purchased from the New York Academy of Medicine, Lane's holdings included more than 35,000 volumes, making it the largest medical library west of Chicago. The collection is especially noteworthy for its works by ancient medical authors, mid-Eastern Medical books, Persian and Arabic manuscripts, 15th-century books and early California medical texts.
Examples of these, as well as Stanford artifacts and memorabilia, will be on display at the open house. The main exhibit "Bugs and Drugs," curated by research nurse Virginia Adi, tells the story of tuberculosis treatment through the centuries. Tours will be offered of the library's "EdTech" lab, which supports innovative use of teaching technology throughout the school. Scanners, multimedia design stations and a pen tablet for digital drawing are a few of the tools available. The lab is a hint of what's to come in the new library facility planned as part of the Learning and Knowledge Center. If plans proceed as hoped, the school will break ground on the new building in 2007.
The centennial celebration will include more exhibits in 2006 and a biomedical knowledge management symposium this fall. —Rosanne Spector
THE 21ST CENTURY
Lane today
Just as the content from the cards in Lane's card catalogs went online in the 1980s, the full text of journals and books are migrating to the digital realm. The digital biomedical collection includes 3,753 journal titles, 381 databases and 1,838 books. More than 1,300 journal titles are accessible online back to volume 1.
Lane's holdings include plenty of old-fashioned books, too. The collection includes 15,917 periodical titles divided up into 404,307 volumes, 165,700 print book titles and 30,000 historical and rare works.
