~This post courtesy Paul Horn, Digitisation Support Officer, Wellcome Collection.
We are at the beginning of a project to digitise Wellcome’s collections of journals – the periodical publications of a range of societies, organisations, and academic disciplines concerned with health. The project is exciting because of its scale, the new challenges it presents, and the benefits it will offer to researchers and other users.
The journal holdings are substantial and are representative of Wellcome’s wide-ranging and unusual collection. Whilst some have a narrow focus on a geographic region and/or special interest, such as the Annual report and transactions of the Plymouth Institution and Devon and Cornwall Natural History Society, others are overtly miscellanies. The Gentleman’s Magazine (first published in 1731) pioneered such an approach: its emphasis was to create a monthly digest of news, commentary and satire for the educated public.
Contributions to that magazine take the form of letters to the editor, Sylvanus Urban (the pen name of its founder, Edward Cave), and range in one volume (selected at random) for 1790, from a consideration of ‘The Celibacy of Fellowes of Colleges’, to remarks on Jamaican vegetable soap from a correspondent in Bermuda, and an illustrated account of a new apparatus ‘for communicating Heat to Bodies apparently dead.’ Debates carried out through its letters could run for several issues. It was the first periodical to use the term magazine (from the French, meaning ‘storehouse’), and utilised a vast distribution system, established by Cave, being read throughout the English-speaking world.
For now, we are focussing only on digitising runs of journals which start and end before the beginning of the twentieth century. Based on the average page count per item, average number of items per serial, and the in-scope to out-of-scope ratio of the material we have assessed so far, we expect the journals currently selected for digitisation to take around a calendar year to photograph, accounting for 4 million individual images. The remainder of titles that begin before 1900 but continue into the twentieth century, and those that begin and end after 1900 would, if we were to digitise them, take almost 7 years to produce nearly 30 million more images.
The journals digitisation project follows on from our work with the Internet Archive to digitise our nineteenth century books collection, which concluded this spring after four years spent preparing, photographing and ingesting 12 million images from 35,000 monographs charting the history of medicine. Whilst the journals share physical characteristics with these books, they differ in ways which present new challenges. Different categories of metadata pertain to them, and the library only holds a single serial level catalogue record for each of the publications we are digitising. Therefore, it is necessary for us, when assessing the material, to decide whether the journal divides most naturally into volumes or issues, and then, using the serial records as templates, to create new records in our digitisation database for each new item, adding volume, issue, edition, and date information. The level of existing metadata is not consistent from one serial to another, so we must maintain attention to detail. The journals are a large collection with limited catalogue information. Therefore, forecasting the duration of the project and refining the schedule is an ongoing process. Creating new records with enhanced metadata not only facilitates scheduling but enables us to develop a more detailed picture of Wellcome’s own holdings.
Together with the Internet Archive, whose staff photograph the journals in a dedicated studio on-site at Wellcome, we have worked towards an easily searchable and browsable way to display the digitised journals on their website. Included as part of the ‘scan list’ we send to the Internet Archive when delivering each batch of journals are composite titles for each item automatically generated from the metadata concerning the journal name, date range, volume, issue and edition. These descriptive titles replace the simpler serial titles in Wellcome’s catalogue when the Internet Archive pull the records for ingest, and are displayed on the Internet Archive site as the main heading for each item. The journals are collected and searchable as part of the main MHL collection at http://www.archive.org/details/medicalheritagelibrary. When we have the capability to do so, they will be displayed on Wellcome’s own site, too.
The journals project has the potential to provide an excellent resource for researchers and other users. Journals lend themselves to fruitful speculative keyword searches which can reveal interesting and unexpected connections, including the juxtaposition of articles with pictorial content such as adverts. They also attract browsing more than other forms – researchers will want to flick through titles to see what changes from volume to volume, month to month, week to week, etc.
As our journals become available online, a more detailed picture of the varied nature of science writing across history will emerge, and researchers will be able to use the breadth of collection to situate material in its cultural context.