Dr Simon Chaplin, Head of the Wellcome Library, writes:
The Wellcome Library and Jisc, the charity that champions the use of digital technologies in UK education and research, have joined forces to digitise over 25,000 19th-century medical books. The books will be selected from the Wellcome Library’s collection and from the collections of other UK research libraries. Once digitised, they’ll be added to Internet Archive’s Medical Heritage Library collection, created by a consortium of North American medical libraries. The Wellcome Library will also be making the collection available from its web site, while Jisc will take the lead in developing educational resources and as well as hosting content on their platforms.
Digitisation of the Wellcome Library’s collections has already started. The project will run through until 2016, with content going live on Internet Archive as it is created. More details on the Wellcome Library blog and from Jisc.
The partnership between Jisc and the Wellcome Library follows the completion last year of a joint project to digitise over 5,500 printed reports of the Medical Officers of Health in Greater London from the 1840s to the 1970s – click here.