Wellcome Library content in the Digital Public Library of America

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) has added some 60,000 items from the Medical Heritage Library, which includes digitised content from the Wellcome Library.

The DPLA was launched in 2013 with the goal of containing “the full breadth of human expression, from the written word, to works of art and culture, to records of America’s heritage, to the efforts and data of science”. It now contains 7.6 million items from 1,100 institutions in the USA.

This partnership means that all the works digitised by the Internet Archive at the Wellcome Library, as part of the UK Medical Heritage Library project, will be available online at several locations:

• DPLA
• Internet Archive
• the Wellcome Library catalogue
• JISC Historical Texts.

The DPLA aggregates metadata records from libraries to create a single search interface, but does not host the images themselves. The website has some useful search tools that allow you to explore the content in different ways. These include:

• a timeline to search by date
• a map to search by location
  
• a number of standalone apps.

DPLA site showing a timeline of Wellcome Library books digitised so far.

Read more about the partnership between the Medical Heritage Library and the DPLA.

Author: Dr Christy Henshaw is Digitisation Programme Manager at the Wellcome Library.