Will more data lead to different histories being told?

New technology is making information more widely available and, when it launches later this year, the WDL will make it easier to access historical evidence about the foundations of modern genetics.  Will this democratize our understanding of the history of genetics and lead to different versions of the history being told?

There is an African proverb which says that history is written by the hunter not the lion.  History inevitably simplifies the past and the selection process can be subjective.  When it launches the WDL will start to put 21 archive collections and around 2,000 books on-line.  The project is to digitise as much as we can rather than cherry pick the highlights. This means that the building blocks used by historians to piece together the past will be made freely available to a wider audience.  A lot of this material may seem like mundane workaday stuff. Users will have to wade through a lot of material to reach the bits they are interested in but this is probably a more accurate reflection of the scientific research process.

Flashes of genius are essential but they do not happen in isolation. Thomas Edison’s phrase about invention being 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration applies to scientific research too. The discovery process needs both.

Watson and Crick were extremely clever to work out the helical structure of DNA but they did not get there simply because they were lone geniuses. Before they made their discovery a lot of people had spent years experimenting, writing and thinking about DNA. There had even been flashes of insight which ended up being wrong.I recently read a letter from Gerald Oster sent to Aaron Klug after Rosalind Franklin’s death, in which he recalled his time working in London. He reflects that even though he had much of the relevant information by early 1950 he lacked the insight to work out the structure of DNA.  This letter (FRKN/06/07/001-2) is held by the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge and a digitised version will become part of the WDL.

I am rather hoping that the WDL might help us to recognise that while flashes of inspiration are part of scientific discovery they are only possible because a team of other people paved the way.

Three Geneticists from the University of Glasgow

The Wellcome Digital Library isn’t just about collections held in the Wellcome Library. We are working with a number of other organisations that hold material on the history of modern genetics. One of the contributing partners, the University of Glasgow Archives Service, have just started to digitise the archives of three men who worked at the University’s Department of Genetics - Guido Pontecorvo (1907-1999), James (Jim) Harrison Renwick (1926-1994) and Malcolm Ferguson-Smith (1931 – ).

You can see photos of their brand new digitising suite here.

Filling the MOH Gaps

The Wellcome Library has a great collection of Medical Officer of Health (MOH) Reports. These reports are stuffed full of grim and useful information from the 19th and 20th century, such as statistics on infant mortality. JISC is, very wisely, funding the digitisation of the London reports. There are some gaps in the Wellcome Library’s collection so, in order to make a really useful digital resource, we have been working out what is missing. This has not been straightforward.

First we needed to check what we held and then we needed to make sure that our gaps really were gaps. We didn’t want to waste time looking for reports that were never created. The very first MOH report in Britain was produced in Liverpool in 1847. The first London report was produced in the following year but the early reports do not cover the whole of London. The Public Health Act of 1848 permitted local authorities to employ MOHs but, since it was not obligatory, only a minority did. The Metropolis Management Act of 1855 required MOHs to be appointed in central London but the big change came with the 1875 Public Health Act. From then until 1972 the production of MOH reports was pretty solid.

Another challenge was getting to grips with the boundary changes. Over the years the administrative boundaries of London have altered several times. The current 32 London Borough boundaries date from 1965 when Greater London was established. Before that there were 28 metropolitan boroughs plus various boroughs, urban and rural district councils in what is now, outer London. Before 1899 much of what we now think of as London was part of Kent, Middlesex, Essex or Surrey. The City of London has long gone its own distinctive way and the tangle of parish boundaries there is particularly confusing. Old maps and a book on administrative units by Frederick A. Youngs helped us to make sense of all these changes.

We have decided to start from the centre and try to create a complete as record as possible for the 12 inner London Boroughs. We’ve got to the stage where we have a list of reports that we want to find. The next step is to track them down in other collections and ask if we can get them digitised.

Watson and Crick Letters

I've just had the privilege of reading a fantastic series of letters written in 1954 by James Watson and Francis Crick. They were written a year after they published their seminal article on the structure of DNA. In the letters the two men are exchanging ideas and their excitement shines through. They write about all sorts of things, for example, the importance of building space filling three dimensional models, confusion over how thymine fits into the helical structure and what the researchers at KCL are up to. In March 1954 Watson also expresses his frustration with the research process, “The whole thing is puzzling and paradoxical (for could DNA be wrong) and is slowly driving me to despair and to loath nucleic acids.” (PP/CRI/D/2/45)

I got to read them because last month the first batch of digitised material arrived from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, one of the five external organisations contributing digitized material to the WDL pilot project. The James Watson archive is held at Cold Spring Harbor and contains the letters written to him by Francis Crick. The letters Watson wrote to Crick are held by the Wellcome Library.

Later this year, when the WDL is launched, Watson and Crick’s correspondence will be digitally united. Lots of people will be able to read these letters (and lots of other stuff) online while the originals stay safely tucked away in their archival homes. I am excited about that!

Wellcome Library joins Strategic Content Alliance

The Wellcome Library is pleased to announce that we’re the latest partners to join the Strategic Content Alliance. You can read the press release here.

Why join? Well, as our digitisation programme gathers pace, one of the key issues we face is making sure that our plans are not developed in isolation. We’re in a lucky position: unlike many libraries and archives, we have the financial resources of the Wellcome Trust to draw upon to support our work. But one of our aims is to make sure that our digitised content is made available to – and is useful to – as wide a range of users as possible, and to make sure that we achieve best value for, and embody best practice in, our programme.

The aim of the Strategic Content Alliance is to bring together key public and not-for-profit sector organisations involved in the creation, management and exploitation of digital content for the common good. By facilitating high-level discussion between partners, the SCA aims to ensure the maximum return on public sector and charitable investment in digitisation. Being part of the Strategic Content Alliance enables us to keep abreast of what others – including the BBC, JISC and the British Library – are up to, and to identify and pursue opportunities for partnership. Some of these are around the sharing of expertise (such as Digipedia, a pilot project developed by SCA), tools to make digital content accessible, and business models that ensure the sustainability of the content we create and the repositories that house it (see for example this post on the SCA blog about work being undertaken by Ithaka S+R for the SCA). Others are about aggregating content and finding ways to complement each others’ work (as with the recent JISC meeting on the First World War Commemoration). The SCA also acts as a coordinating body to provide sound business intelligence and ensure effective advocacy on issues that cut across our shared interests, such as copyright and orphan works. Nor is the benefit limited to our in-house programmes: our involvement with the SCA will also help to inform the Wellcome Trust’s strategy towards the funding of digitisation projects elsewhere.