Wellcome Collection is a free museum and library exploring health, life and our place in the world. Inspired by the collections assembled by Henry Wellcome, we encourage great ideas about health by connecting science, medicine, life and art.
We seek to create opportunities for people to think deeply about the connections between science, medicine, life and art by making thought-provoking content and improving access to the diverse perspectives represented by our collections and through research.
Digital media and services are vital to this mission. Our aim is to design and build a free and unrestricted digital space where more people than ever can engage, be inspired and challenged to think about what it means to be healthy and human.
Where we’ve been
We have a strong track record in digital engagement with our community of online visitors and peers in the cultural heritage sector.
Since 2009 we have digitised and openly licensed over 200,000 items (around 31.5 million images) from Wellcome Library’s collections; this number is now growing at over a quarter of a million images a month.
We have experimented with editorial storytelling, from long-form stories to digital art commissions, games and innovative social media initiatives. From a technology perspective we are founding members and early adopters of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF).
However, we are now looking to make a step change in how people engage with Wellcome Collection and how we deliver those digital services: seeking to apply the culture, practices and technologies of the internet era to respond to people’s raised expectations.
Where we’re going
Core to our new digital strategy is to bring together wellcomecollection.org, wellcomelibrary.org and wellcomeimages.org into a single website under the banner of Wellcome Collection.
This website will, we hope, be visually striking, offering fresh and exciting ways to discover and engage with content. It will provide a coherent digital user experience that helps cultivate the exchange of ideas, knowledge and experience in support of an inclusive and diverse community.
To achieve this we have embarked on designing and developing a modern, robust and open platform that provides the foundation for ongoing innovation in search and discovery of our collections and editorial content across the museum and library; backed up by a functional image production system to manage the digitisation and photography workflows.
In 2016 we brought together content, design, technical and digitisation teams. We introduced a new Product Management approach, created new roles for software engineering, user research and design, and began the process of establishing a transparent and lean development process.
Rather than designing and relaunching the entire site in one giant step — a strategy that is both expensive and high-risk — we are instead making small incremental changes, learning from what people say and do along the way. Working this way means that we’re able to have more confidence that our ideas, designs and approach are valuable and useful, and we are able to deliver improvements faster, but it also means that the old websites and the new will exist side-by-side for a while.
Over the coming months and years you will begin to see significant changes to our online experience. If you would like to peek behind the curtain you can look at Cardigan, our pattern library, or the source code (all openly licensed) on Github. We are also be providing API access and openly blogging about what we’re doing, what’s worked and what hasn’t.
