Putting Medical Officer of Health reports on the map

The Wellcome Library holds nearly 3,000 Medical Officer of Health reports, the most complete collection of its kind in Great Britain. These can already be searched on our catalogue, where the ‘Place’ and ‘Refine by tag’ facets make it easy to narrow down your search by geographical area.

But it also makes sense to view geographical information on a map:

Every red dot is a placemarker for each report that we hold, and the sheer number of placemarkers shows the volume of this material at the Wellcome Library. As with any Google Map, you can drag and zoom in and out to focus on a particular place. Placemarkers not only indicate that we have a report for that area. Click one and you get more information about the report itself, as well as a link to it in our catalogue:

The map was created by putting some Library data into a Google Fusion Table. You can play around with the map a bit more there. For example, it’s easy to see a map for records with a particular subject heading, such as ‘Harbors’, by filtering: