Wellcome Digital Library blog

In August 2010, the Wellcome Library announced an ambitious plan to develop a world-class digital resource for the History of Medicine. The core of this resource will be digitised content from the Library's own holdings, although funding will also be made available to others to digitise complementary collections for inclusion in the digital library.

As we move into the world of large-scale digitisation - with a short-term plan of 1m images online in the next 2 years - a number of questions, issues and opportunities await us. We have already started tackling some of the big questions, such as:

• What should we digitise?
• What content is of most value to researchers?
• What online toolset should we offer researchers?
• How can we use the digital library to encourage learning and discovery?

And of course there are the nitty-gritty technical issues, including:

• Logistics of digitisation and workflows.
• In-house vs. outsource options.
• Metadata.
• Long-term data management.
• Delivery formats, speeds, and functions.

As we work through these issues, and progress with our digitisation programme, we will use our new Wellcome Digital Library blog as a real-time progress report, discussion outlet, and notification area.