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.