Medical Officer of Health reports to be digitised

The Wellcome Library has received JISC funding towards the creation of a major free online dataset covering public health in London from the mid-19th century to the late 20th century.

This project is based on the reports of the Medical Officers of Health (MOH) in Greater London between 1848 and 1972. Of all the collections in the Wellcome Library the MOH reports have the greatest research potential for the study of public health history in 19th and 20th century Britain, and are one of the most heavily consulted collections at the Wellcome Library. Online access to this resource will vastly increase their impact on research and would be invaluable to public health researchers, epidemiologists and practitioners, as well as medical and social historians.

The Medical Officers of Health systematically monitored and oversaw the provision of disparate services that contributed to the well-being of local populations. The Officers – individually and as a group – were one of the most influential agents of social and medical reform in Britain over a period of more than a century. Their reports contain a wealth of information (especially statistical data) and there is a long pedigree of advanced research using MOH reports as primary source materials for a wide range of subjects including (but not limited to) food and food safety; maternity and child welfare; housing; pollution; manufacturing (e.g. the inspection of workshops); shops and offices; sanitation; social care; civil liberties; demography; engineering and meteorological conditions.

Digitising these extensive holdings will not only improve access to an important body of research material, but will offer opportunities for new approaches to text and data mining. Digitisation and text encoding will be carried out in 2012, and will be made freely available on the Wellcome Digital Library website in early 2013. For more information you can read the project plan on the JISC website.

Arabic manuscript project - information online

The Wellcome Arabic manuscript project has a new webpage providing information on the project aims, project partners, standards, technology development, and more. This page will be updated regularly to show progress and make relevant documents available. The project plan is already available to view.

Image: WMS Arabic 461, f.1a

Wellcome Film officially launched

Readers of this blog, subscribers to our Wellcome Film YouTube channel, and those who regularly use our film collection will know that digital video has been available online for several months now, with more titles added on a regular basis as the Wellcome Film project moves forward. This week we took a moment to celebrate 2 years of work on this project by holding an official Launch party at the Wellcome Library on 2 November 2009. The official press release is on the Wellcome Trust website.

Around 90 people attended, with a champagne reception to kick off. Richard Aspin, Head of Research and Scholarship at the Wellcome Library, introduced the project and the collection, saying that "Wellcome Film is the one of the most important digitisation project to date in our ambition to transform the user experience of The Wellcome Library."

Following Richard, our keynote speaker Jordan Baseman talked about his film project Nature's Great Experiment, a thought-provoking documentary on behaviour and genetics of twins. The film explores themes researched by Professor Terrie Moffitt and the Twin Studies Research Team at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London. Jordan's project was partly funded by the Wellcome Trust. Jordan discussed one particular film that he discovered in the Library's Moving Image and Sound Collection, The Management of Twins in Pregnancy and Labour (1958), produced by the Wellcome Trust and filmed at University College Hospital, London. The film proved to be a catalyst for his project, providing much-needed inspiration to bring his ideas together. Before showing a short clip from his project, Jordan described the 1958 film during his speech as

"...an extraordinary document that at its heart focuses on the delivery of two sets of twins. It is a stunningly beautiful, profound and slightly disturbing document. It is disturbing because of the passivity of the mothers, but also because of the location and presence of the camera. The camera is not passive. It is an active instrument that records these momentous events from a privileged vantage point. The twins are literally delivered to camera: displayed for us to see."

Angela Saward, Curator of the Moving Images and Sound Collection at the Library, rounded off the evening by thanking the long list of people and organisations involved in the project - in particular the Project Advisory Board, JISC Collections who part funded this project, and Lucy Smee, who spent 17 months cataloguing, quality checking, and segmenting almost every single title. Angela then showed a film trailer created for the project by JCA tv, the facilities house that provided telecine, video recording, encoding and transcription services (see below).

JISC funding for the Wellcome Arabic Manuscript Cataloguing Project

The Wellcome Library, Bibliotheca Alexandrina, and Kings College London have been awarded a grant by the JISC's Islamic Studies Catalogue and Manuscript Digitisation funding stream.

This collaborative project will create a searchable digital collection of Arabic manuscripts to be hosted by the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt. Images and metadata will also be available from the Wellcome Library's website. The partners will be jointly designing and implementing a cataloguing system to enable the creation and management of descriptive metadata for Asian manuscripts. Cover-to-cover images of the manuscripts and TEI-compliant metadata will be available freely to search, view and reuse.

500 manuscripts from the 14th - 20th century sourced from the Wellcome Library's collections will be digitised and catalogued. This collection, containing major significant works pertaining to the history of Islamic medicine from the 9th - 20th century, is of great interest to scholars of Islamic medicine and science as well as historians of Islam. By virtually repatriating these works to the Middle East, the project contributes to the Bibliotheca Alexandrina's aim to become the premier Digital Library of Islamic scholarly resources and Arabic culture in the world.

Currently, the Wellcome Library holds only very basic MARC21 records for most of its Arabic manuscripts. In recent years, an online catalogue using the TEI MASTER metadata standard was created for a small sub-collection of the Arabic manuscripts (the Haddad collection), establishing some basic working principles for cataloguing these items. A new cataloguing tool will build on the existing Haddad system, extending its usefulness in many ways and reflecting changes in the new TEI standard. It will facilitate the comprehensive and accurate description of the manuscripts both as objects and text, including the ability to display and store non-standard Arabic characters and bi-directional text, and enabling full-text searching of the metadata in both English and Arabic. Open source, the tool will have an extensible structure that could be modified for other Asian scripts.

The Centre for Computing in the Humanties department at Kings College London will be bringing their expertise to bear on the design and development of this software, and the TEI schema to be implemented. The system will then be used by the Bibliotheca Alexandrina to carry out in-depth cataloguing of the manuscripts. Images and metadata will be made available primarily by the Bibliotheca Alexandrina via a dedicated website. The Wellcome Library will also provide access via its existing catalogue.

Example PDFs of four manuscripts from the Haddad collection are available online.