"Circulating Now, Full Circle" published by Virginia Tech Publishing

"Circulating Now, Full Circle," a volume co-edited by Elizabeth A. Mullen and Jeffrey S. Reznick and published open access by Virginia Tech Publishing, collects and curates selected posts from Circulating Now, the popular blog of the National Library of Medicine (NLM). The book offers new access to the library’s world-renowned collections spanning eleven centuries and reflecting a wide range of human experience with health and illness across time and place.

"Circulating Now, Full Circle" is freely available through Virginia Tech Publishing.

The contributions included in "Circulating Now, Full Circle" explore medical history in a wide variety of contexts and reveal the value and relevance of the NLM collection to inform current research, contemporary health topics, and library practice. Subjects range from a Mughal-era medical textbook embellished with images from a love story to a comparison of the abilities of humans versus computers in curating web collections. These and dozens of other contributions authored by NLM researchers, volunteers, interns, and staff from a variety of disciplines are grouped in thematic chapters, with original introductions explaining the significance of the selected posts in the context of the NLM’s stewardship of its collections and the library’s overall public service. 

"Circulating Now, Full Circle" reveals the sheer depth and breadth of the NLM collections and argues for their importance as a public resource for research, teaching, and learning about the history of health and medicine in the twenty-first century. "Circulating Now, Full Circle" is an outstanding example of scholarly writing for a general audience and a model for researcher engagement at the world’s largest biomedical library located on the Bethesda, Maryland, campus of the National Institutes of Health.

Virginia Tech researchers and writers, from undergraduates to professors, have engaged with the NLM collections and contributed posts to the blog "Circulating Now," on which this new book is based. In November 2018, Virginia Tech’s own E. Thomas Ewing, associate dean for research in Virginia Tech’s College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, has helped more than a dozen students publish essays on "Circulating Now." He co-authored the post “Revealing Data: Measuring Mortality During an Epidemic” with Ian Hargreaves, Jessica King, Andrew Pregnall, and Tyler Talnagi while they were all working or studying at Virginia Tech. This post now appears in "Circulating Now, Full Circle," along with a preface co-authored by Ewing and Virginia Tech graduate Mary Culler. 

“'Circulating Now' posts are particularly well-suited for use in educational settings to advance students’ appreciation for the complex history of medicine. 'Circulating Now' has provided opportunities for students—including interns, graduate students, and undergraduates completing academic projects—to present their research as emerging scholars, or as part of a research team… Now ['Circulating Now, Full Circle']—as its title conveys—brings 'Circulating Now' full circle in a discrete publication that reintroduces and augments this valuable public resource. As a part of the very collections it aims to enhance, this book itself will now circulate widely, helping these collections reach new audiences and, in doing so, advance public understanding of the history of medicine.”

"Circulating Now, Full Circle" is out now:

The PDF and EPUB are freely available on Virginia Tech Publishing’s website at https://doi.org/10.21061/circulating-now

The PDF is also freely available via NLM Digital Collections at https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/CirculatingNowFullCircle

The color paperback is available on Amazon for $26.87 at https://www.amazon.com/dp/1962841987?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title

Read "Circulating Now, Full Circle" for free online. If you are interested in publishing your work through Virginia Tech Publishing, contact publishing@vt.edu.