Sharing a $360,000 grant from the Open Knowledge Commons with four partner libraries, NLM will digitize items from its extensive holdings, including medical publications dating back to the 17th century. They will be among some 30,000 volumes within the public domain of historic significance to be digitized from the NLM, the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and the New York Public Library.

The NLM History of Medicine Division collection includes 90 early western manuscripts (before 1600), 139 Arabic and Persian medical manuscripts, an East Asian collection of more than 2,000 printed books, manuscripts and visual materials, over 83,000 prints and photographs, all printed books in the NLM collection printed before 1914, thousands of later pamphlets and dissertations, and all pre-1871 journals.

The Open Knowledge Commons is a nonprofit organization dedicated to building a universal digital library for democratic access to information. It is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.