Vienna, Austria, Dec. 15, 2008 – H.M. Pharma Consultancy, a globally acting provider of market intelligence and intellectual property development services to the international life science industry, has commenced a philanthropic project that provides free online access to medical and  pharmaceutical data and concepts from German sources dating back to the late 19th century.

“Obviously our commercial activities have to keep abreast with the cutting edge of the sciences, but as time moves on much old knowledge tends to drop from public awareness simply because it is not available on the internet in searchable formats,” says Hermann A.M. Mucke, PhD., H. M. Pharma's General Manager. “Projects such as Google Books, which scan old books and journals and make the uncorrected OCR texts available to the public, are extremely commendable because they counteract this trend. However, they exclude German material that is printed in the old Fraktur script, which was common until the early 20th century. We are now assisting the non-profit project retro-bib (www.retrobibliothek.de) in the low-level correction of raw texts from the 1894 issue of the German Brockhaus Encyclopedia. Naturally, we focus on content that we are familiar with but which is difficult to understand and correct for others – items from medicine, pharmacology, and chemistry. While the results might not be directly useful for our commercial operations, they provide fascinating insights into the understanding of diseases and therapeutic concepts at a time when medicine was, by today's standards, almost helpless in its confrontation with diseases for which targeted therapies are now commonplace.”

H. M. Pharma Consultancy has already completed correction of the pertinent pages in the first of 16 volumes of the 1894 Brockhaus encyclopedia, and plans to continue with this program as far as available resources allow it. The results are available to the public at www.retrobibliothek.de, and are also automatically indexed by web search engines.