Roots of Medicine: A Collaborative Medicinal Garden Project

Background: In an effort to increase the visibility of rare book room holdings, and to foster inclusion of history of medicine materials in curricula across campus, we proposed to create a medicinal garden with accompanying digital exhibit. In collaboration with representatives from a local gardening group, the college of Pharmacy, and a horticulture expert from a partner institution, a medicinal garden was planted. Informational signs were created with QR codes connecting to a custom website with information on each plant--including images and text from digitized rare books showing historic use, syntheses of contemporary medical research, and links to additional information.

Description: While many medical libraries have rare book rooms or special collections, encouraging their use or incorporating those collections into curricula can often be a challenge. In response to this, librarians at Hardin Library at the University of Iowa have been working on creating an interactive medicinal garden that will promote these collections. Our poster will include descriptions of the process, images of the garden, examples of the physical plant tags with QR codes, and examples of plant records included in the accompanying website. We will discuss how we acquired funding, partnered with stakeholders, and identified faculty who plan to incorporate the garden into their courses, as well as how we overcame numerous challenges along the way.

Conclusion: This program is still in progress. Once completed, we will evaluate the effectiveness of the project through web analytics for the accompanying website, evaluation of course integration, and tracking of rare book room events, visits, and reference transactions connected with the medicinal garden project.