Educational Sessions

The Center for the History of Medicine offers educational sessions that serve the faculty, staff, and students of Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Dental Medicine, and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard-affiliated hospitals, and the general public.

Educational Sessions

The Center for the History of Medicine welcomes partnerships with educators with curricula that intersect with history of medicine subjects. Working with the Center can significantly enrich educational experiences and help build primary source literacy.

Educational sessions are different from tours. While tours provide general information about Center collections, educational sessions are an opportunity for educators to work with Center staff to select collection materials that support specific educational objectives.

We can also schedule educational sessions that focus on how to find history of medicine resources and provide bibliographic instruction.

Primary source literacy is vital to building new generations of informed researchers. As information resources and museum professionals, our hope is to uphold the goals of the draft SAA-ACRL/RBMS publication, Guidelines for Primary Source Literacy (PDF). As stated in the Guidelines, "Primary source literacy is the combination of knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary to effectively find, interpret, evaluate, and ethically use primary sources within specific disciplinary contexts, in order to create new knowledge or to revise existing understandings."

Our Public Services staff can help students of all ages and disciplines become aware of the rich variety of primary sources available at the Center.

Please contact the Center to schedule an educational session.

Archives and Records Management Trainings

The Archives and Records Management (ARM) program collects the archival records of the Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Dental Medicine, and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Our Archives and Records Management program:

• Holds trainings for Harvard staff, faculty, and students on Harvard's General Records Schedule (GRS) to promote University compliance.
• Offers one-on-one consultations and trainings for staff and departments.
• Provides help and advice on organizing paper and electronic records, including research data.
• Helps staff and faculty determine which records should go to the Center for the History of Medicine to capture the history of Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Dental Medicine.
• Partners with the Countway's Research Data Management Services to teach classes such as Getting Started with Data Management Plans and Tips and Tools for Data Storage at Harvard.

Please contact ARM to schedule an ARM training or browse upcoming classes.

Legacy Building Sessions

Our acquisitions team are available to meet with Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Dental Medicine, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Harvard-affiliated hospital faculty and biomedical researchers to offer guidance on the records and objects they should keep to document their professional activities and research. These records have long-term value and are often acquired by the Center as part of manuscript and museum collections. They inform the interpretation of communities of practice and biomedical disciplines.

Legacy Building sessions address what archives are and what they generally do and do not collect. The Center cares about the content of records regardless of format; they can be paper-based, born digital, three-dimensional, visual, or audio-visual in format.

Please contact us to learn more.