Happy 3rd Birthday Wellcome Library Blog!

As we've marked our previous birthdays, we thought it would be rather amiss not to mark our third birthday with a post summarising our activities over the last 365 days.

The Library Blog still follows the path we set down back on 28th October 2008: aiming to summarise current activities of Library staff and flag up interesting material from our collections. As in previous years, we've shown the breadth of our collections by tying into anniversaries and special days and weeks: for instance, we marked National Curry Week with an 18th Century Botanist, travelled with a doctor to 19th cenury North American for World Tourism Day and followed a particular 'Victorian paper trail' for World Toilet Day.

Insights into our current digitisation work have also been proffered, drawing out stories from the papers of scientists such as Peter Medawar and Arthur Mourant. Whilst thoughts on the Conservation implications of digitisation projects have also been aired along with the announcement of the launch of Wellcome Arabic Manuscripts Online.

Our Items of the Month have again highlighted the breadth of our collections and the blog has also highlighted major acquisitions, none more important this year than a portrait by Pierre Chasselat of the French surgeon Ange-Bernard Imbert-Delonnes. We're also delighted to have featured more guest posts on the Blog, particularly those by both Dr Duncan Wilson and Dr Vanessa Heggie, describing how they utilised our resources for their recent publications.

Thank you very much to all the people who have contributed their time and energies to the Blog over the last year. The writers of the Blog posts, but more importantly, everyone's who's spared the time to read what we've written. Here's to another year of Wellcome Library Blogging!

Blog Carnivals

In one of Nick Poyntz's recent articles on 'Digital History' for History Today - now collected as a Blog - he explains the concept of Blog Carnivals:

"A blog carnival is a collection of posts on a particular theme or topic. History bloggers take turns to volunteer to host a particular edition. Often the posts will have been nominated by other bloggers. They are an excellent way of getting an overview of the topics and periods being discussed".

Amongst the Blog Carnivals highlighted is one focused on the history of science, 'Giant's Shoulders'. The latest Giant's Shoulders - on the theme of 'Visuals & Representations' and hosted at the blog From the Hands of Quacks - is now online and we're delighted that amongst the great links, is one to our recent post 'Tour de Francis'.

(We can also take this opportunity to flag up the last two Giant's Shoulders Blog Carnivals of 2010 - which will be on Esoteric Science and 19th century science. More details on this - including details on how to submit entries - in this Giant's Shoulders post).

Eureka!

It's always pleasing to receive praise from your peers, so we were delighted when in the most recent edition of Eureka magazine (produced by The Times), Dr Alice Bell of Imperial College picked the Wellcome Library's Blog as one of six science blogs of note.

Alice has since reposted her selections on her own blog, where you'll find us in the company of Mind Hacks, SciCurious, Gimpyblog’s posterous, Exquisite Life and Not so humble pie.

Many thanks Alice!

Happy 2nd Birthday Wellcome Library Blog!

Given a number of our posts celebrate anniversaries in one form or another, we can't leave the second birthday of the Wellcome Library Blog unannounced.

The origins of this Blog were recounted in a post on our first birthday, but over the last 12 months we've tried to maintain our range of posts and increase our variety where we can. So, archives and manuscripts cataloguing is now summarised every month; overviews are offered on the work of different Library departments and we've also started to post more details about our electronic resources and also on exhibitions to which we've loaned material from our collections.

As digitisation is such a key part of the Library's strategy over the next few years, we've even launched two new Blogs dedicated to this theme. We'll still be posting here about our digitisation work as well as on our other activities, such as new discoveries about existing items, flagging up the use of Library material in the media, and promoting events and workshops going on at the Library or involving Library staff.

Pleasingly, the last year has continued to see a high rate of visits from around the world (for the record, the bare stats are 49,000 visits and 76,000 page views over the last 12 months). Our posts have continued to be retweeted and highlighted by others and we're continually delighted by the coverage and readership the Blog has. The last year has seen those who follows us through Twitter continue to rise and also the creation of a Wellcome Library Facebook page.

So, a very big thank you to all the Wellcome Library staff who continue to contribute to the Blog and an even bigger thank you to everyone who takes the time to read what we've written: here's hoping we can keep up our efforts as we enter our third year!

Note: The word cloud at the top of this page is based on the labels we've used to tag individual posts.

New Wellcome Digital Library blog

The Wellcome Library has launched a new blog (wellcomedigitallibrary.blogspot.com/), centered on the development of the Wellcome Digital Library. The blog will be a "a real-time progress report, discussion outlet, and notification area", and will complement the Library's other blogs by providing more specific and technical information related to the Library's pilot programme and continued development of the digital library.

Topics to be covered include:

• What will be digitised, and how the content will be of use to researchers.
• How we will facilitate research activity, learning, and discovery.
  
• Logistics of digitisation and workflows.
• Metadata.
• Long-term data management.
• Delivery formats, speeds, and functions.

Future migration of JPEG 2000 blog post

We announced the creation of our JPEG 2000 blog last month, and since then we have posted on several aspects of our experiences implementing the format, including setting up a Working Group around JPEG 2000 use in the library, museum and archive world. The blog has been well received so far, with several thought-provoking comments and over 800 visitors in its first month.

In a recent post, Digital Curator Dave Thompson discusses issues around the long-term management of JPEG 2000. Our current approach demonstrates that, while we have chosen a lossy format for our master image files, we are not ignoring the future implications of our actions:

"Obsolescence is not something totally beyond our control. We are free to decide when obsolescence actually occurs, when it becomes a problem we need to deal with, and, with proper long term management strategies how we plan to migrate from obsolete formats to current ones. The choice of JPEG2000 as a master format supports this broader approach to data management." Read more...

As a library, long-term preservation of information is a key service that we provide: not only for our physical collections, but for our digital holdings as well.

New blog: JPEG 2000 at the Wellcome Library

There is very little useful, practical advice available on the implementation of the JPEG 2000 image format. In order to share our own experiences with JPEG 2000, we have set up a dedicated blog.

The Wellcome Library is committed to using JPEG 2000 as its archive and access image standard for its digitisation programme, as mentioned in an earlier post. Since this decision was made last year, we have commissioned a report, attended various seminars, met with experts, tested compression levels and conversion tools, and initiated the JP2K-UK Implementation Working Group.

The blog will chart our experiences with JPEG 2000 to date (we have a little way to go before we catch up) and will be regularly updated with our progress as we continue to develop our workflow. Look out for interesting titbits on JPEG 2000 in general, as we continue to learn and explore the practical application of JPEG 2000 formats, features and software tools.

The blog is also available via our new Twitter account, Wellcome Digital.

Happy 1st Birthday Wellcome Blog!

The Wellcome Library Blog was born a year ago today. On that day, a small group of staff at the Library decided to try to bring our audiences closer to the holdings and work of the Library in an engaging, personal, but professional way. Drawing on the natural enthusiasm and interests of the Library's staff, a blog would, we hoped, allow us to achieve this.

As a result, Library staff have in the past 12 months waxed lyrical about the Library's collections in the areas of cataloguing and digitisation projects, new accessions, and new discoveries about existing items in the collections; bragged about the use of Library material in the media, news topics about the Library's activities, and events and workshops going on at the Library or involving Library staff, or pontificated to the wider world about so many other areas of relevance to the Library and the History of Medicine that I can't possibly list them all here.

Our efforts haven't gone in vain: this blog has been visited over 20,000 times in the past year, and those visitors have viewed our pages over 40,000 times. People keep coming back again and again, with nearly 40% returning multiple times. We're truly global as well. We've attracted fingers at keyboards and eyes on screens in 139 countries, representing 78 languages.

We haven't done this completely on our own, however. A good proportion of traffic to our site was routed via several other blogs such as Wonders and Marvels and Morbid Anatomy who pick up on our stories and take them to new levels on a regular basis (thanks guys!). Twitter has also raised our profile by a significant margin - all those fans retweeting our stories for the delectation of their followers has spread the word to audiences we would never otherwise be able to reach.

So here's a big thank you to all the Library staff who have contributed to the blog, and an even bigger thank you to those who read it. We hope you will keep coming back for more!

For more specific information on the blog statistics over the past 12 months, see this staff presentation.

Note: The word cloud at the top of this page is based on the labels we use to tag individual posts.

Wellcome Library blog receives over 3,500 visits in 4 months

The Wellcome Library blog, born on 11 November, 2008, has to date received over 3,500 visits and over 6,000 page views. Interest was high initially with 82 visits on its second day alone, while during the run-up to Christmas, and during the holidays, visits waned. But in the New Year visits began a steep climb, and our highest daily number of visits was 99 on 15 February.

Over the lifetime of the blog so far, we have managed to keep the interest of our loyal returning visitors, while also luring in new visitors with around 60% of visits being newcomers. People spend quite a lot of time reading the site as well, averaging 1.44 minutes on the site (with a maximum of just over 5 minutes having been achieved on a few particular days).

Visitors find us from all over the globe - the majority from the UK and the US. Over 90% of US visitors are new, while the UK visitors are 60% returnees.

How do our readers find us? Well, mostly through Google, as expected (33%), while 16% find the blog by clicking directly on a link (presumably in emails or using their favourites). Blogger.com is a great advertiser, bring in exactly as many readers as the link on the main Library website. Twitter is fast becoming a huge draw for the blog, in the past month being the 3rd most likely source for visitors, with Stumbleupon, oddly, being the number 4 most likely source in the past month (we must have been recommended). We are also linked to by many other blogs (most of them are in our blogroll), and this draws in a lot of readers - so a big thank you to all our fellow blog-owners who mention us or add us to their blogroll.

The Library staff have worked hard to bring blog readers a wide variety of interesting and topical news stories, and these statistics demonstrate the value of sharing information in an easy-to-access, informal way.