Wellcome Collection: Explore
Danny Birchall, Wellcome Trust, United Kingdom
http://www.wellcomecollection.org/explore.aspx
Sitting at the centre of the recently relaunched Welcome Collection website, ‘Explore’ provides a unique themed guide to medicine, life and art through objects and media in the Wellcome collections. It includes elements from the Wellcome Library, Wellcome Images, Wellcome Film, and the Science Museum’s Brought to Life resource as well as educational articles and interactives commissioned by the Wellcome Trust.
Explore is arranged into six broad themes:
- Life, genes and you
- Mind and body
- Sickness and health
- Time and place
- Science and art
- Education
In each theme, individual topics focus on particular subjects such as genetics, death, or London’s particular history of medicine, offering insight both into the subject and Wellcome Collection resources. Each object is accompanied by a short narrative contextualising it, and a topic article gives an overview of the subject.
Where resources come from digitised items in Wellcome Collection catalogues, deep links are provided to help researchers make the most of the Welcome collections. Many items are also available under a Creative Commons licence, and this is indicated in both machine and human-readable formats.
Wellcome Collection is part of the philanthropic legacy of Sir Henry Wellcome, the pharmacist, entrepreneur, philanthropist and collector. During his lifetime, he amassed the world's most impressive collections relating to medicine and health through the ages; since his death, those collections have been both dispersed and enhanced. Explore unites elements from disparate locations in a structure that allows users to discover the intersections between contemporary medicine and life.
Demonstration: Demonstrations - III [Close Up]
Keywords: collections, medicine, science, art, film, images
