What will the Wellcome Digital Library offer?

The overall strategy of the Wellcome Digital Library is to support three activity layers aimed at different user behaviours:

• Engage – by highlighting the range of material available in the Library, and using actively curated content to encourage visitors to investigate further;
• Discover – allow users to investigate our holdings by searching or browsing on subject themes and names, and retrieving a mixture of actively curated and automatically generated content;
• Research – enable users to conduct a single search which will identify all relevant material in the Library, including digitised and non-digitised holdings, and allow users to facet, select and manipulate this content as needed.

To support these activities the following IT systems will be procured and developed over the next 2 years:

• Search and discovery – to encourage users to engage with our content;
• Delivery - to provide access to the content;
• Workflow – to manage all aspects of the digitisation processes;
• Storage – to ensure that digitised content can be preserved securely;
• Digital asset management – to manage the digital objects that are created.

Through these systems we will seek to provide our users with the ability to:

• Find relevant materials through fast, accurate, and comprehensive search functions, including full-text search;
• View, download and reuse content under a range of licenses, including Creative Commons licenses where appropriate;
• Engage with the content through a variety of Web 2.0 and other tools that will include the ability to comment on and tag content and provide transcriptions.
  

Not only will the digital library be technically capable of supporting these activities, but there will be a wide range of resources on offer, with a critical mass of content from the Library's holdings. As much as possible, discreet collections will be digitised and made available in their entirety, with cover-to-cover imaging employed as standard (more soon!).