LIBRARY AND INFORMATION RESOURCES

12 February 2007

The Wellcome Library provides free public access to more than a million items related to the history of health, disease and medicine. The Wellcome Trust also works to enhance access to key information resources and publishes material in a range of formats for a variety of audiences.

This year's award of the contract to run UK PubMed Central, to a partnership between the British Library, the University of Manchester and the European Bioinformatics Institute, reflects the central place of the web in providing access to information. Use of the Wellcome Library website continues to grow and considerable resource material is now published on the Wellcome Trust's main site. The major exception is developing countries, where, for the time being at least, there is still a role for alternative resources such as CD-ROMs.

The Wellcome Library

In October 2005, the Wellcome Library collections were awarded 'Designation' status by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA), in recognition of their outstanding national and international importance.

Among many notable acquisitions was a portrait of an 18th-century Dorset farmer, Benjamin Jesty, who, in 1774, used cowpox inoculations to protect his wife and children against smallpox – 20 years before Edward Jenner's famous 'first' vaccination.

In January 2006, the Wellcome Library co-organised (with the Digital Curation Centre) and hosted a two-day workshop on future-proofing institutional websites. Websites are key repositories of information, but their transience may mean important material is lost, without suitable archiving procedures – such as the Wellcome Library's web-archiving programme.

Two INSET training days for teachers were held in 2006, to encourage teachers to use historical approaches (and Wellcome Library materials) in their teaching.

The winning images in the Wellcome Trust Biomedical Image Awards 2006 went online and on show at the Wellcome Library foyer in July 2006. An additional display opened at the National Science Learning Centre in York.

Biomedical Information

On 27 July 2006, the contract to run UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) was awarded (see Corporate activities). As part of the drive towards open access, the Medical Journals Backfiles Digitisation project was launched in May 2006. Through the project, complete back issues of significant biomedical journals – eventually some three million pages covering nearly 200 years – are being made freely available online.

The £1.3 million initiative is jointly funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), and was developed through a partnership between the Trust, JISC, the US National Library of Medicine and medical journal publishers.

In April 2006, the Wellcome Trust won the first Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) Europe Award for its work on open access publishing.

Publishing

The second and third issues of 'Wellcome Science' were published, showcasing notable Wellcome Trust-funded projects and providing insight into the latest scientific discoveries. Subjects covered included the placebo effect, clinical use of stem cells, body clocks and the neuroscience of social interactions. 'Wellcome Focus on Ageing' summarised scientific, medical and social developments in ageing.

Full text for 'Wellcome Science' and 'Wellcome Focus' is now available online, along with all articles from the Trust's quarterly magazine, 'Wellcome News'.

The Trust's Human Genome website was relaunched with: an updated design; in-depth sections on topics such as diabetes, cancer and gene therapy; and new articles on the science of the human genome, its role in health and medicine, and the broader social impact of genetic knowledge.

The Publishing Group – International Health underwent an extensive evaluation of its educational and training CD-ROMs, which are now in use by more than 50 000 people in over 80 countries worldwide. The evaluation revealed very high levels of user satisfaction; nearly half of all users reported improvements in professional or clinical practice, or improved healthcare delivery. A third edition of the best-selling CD-ROM on malaria was published during the year.

A collaboration with Fiocruz, the Brazilian national research organisation, will see Topics in International Health CD-ROMs translated into Portuguese for the Brazilian and Portuguese-speaking African markets. The project promises to bring the CD-ROMs to countries with a combined population of over 200 million.