The History of Science and Technology Collection (HSTC) is one facet of the University of Wisconsin's Digital Collections (UWDC) web site. HSTC is a small but growing collection of digitized books and journals that represent either unique sci‐tech titles that are held by the UW‐Madison libraries, or writings about scientific research at UW‐Madison. Currently the HSTC provides access to over a dozen sub‐collections containing multiple works or volumes, as well as assorted additional monographs. The journals/series sub‐collection includes volumes of Nature from 1869 through 1875, and the Smithsonian Science Series, monographs on general science topics for the lay reader that were published in the 1930s. When appropriate, works in the HSTC are linked to additional resources on the greater Digital Collections web site. For example, the HSTC's annotation for A Comparative View of the Human and Animal Frame (1860) includes a link to Veterinary Anatomical Illustrations, a section of the Science Collection. Some of the more intriguing HSTC titles are from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and present some challenging reading. The scanned images for Ephraim Chambers's (1728) Cyclopaedia, or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences are clear, but the text is written in very formal English. And Correspondence Concerning Iceland (1772‐1818) was written by hand. HSTC provides several useful features for zooming in on hard to read text, changing to a gallery view to get an overall feel for the look of a work, switching from a scanned image to the corresponding scanned text file, and printing the scanned image.
Searching the HSTC is fairly straightforward. There are three search modes: simple, Boolean, and proximity. There is a separate search page for each type of search, and every search is compared against full text in the collection. Simple search allows the user to search for a word or phrase in the full text of a single work or the entire collection. Simple search can also be limited to only titles or authors rather than the content of the works. Boolean search adds not only the ability to compose more complex search strategies, but also offers searching within the same page or paragraph, the same section, or an entire work. One important disclaimer that appears at many places on the HSTC site is a warning that full text searching does not apply to every text in the collection, because the uncorrected OCR system that was used did not perform well on embellished fonts, obsolete characters, handwriting, and the like. In such cases, searches can still be run on authors and titles. However, there does not seem to be a clear list of the texts for which full text searching is not available. Overall, while search is easy to use, one streamlined search page offering simple, Boolean, and proximity searching would be more efficient for the user.
The History of Science and Technology Collection provides interesting browsing and reading for general science buffs, especially for those with an interest in history. And while the HSTC's holdings are far from comprehensive, HSTC can provide a student or researcher with a rich glimpse of scientific thinking from centuries ago.
