Sunglasses or umbrella?

Wellcome weather is a new web experiment in the Sandbox on the Wellcome Library web site. Each day, different pictures selected from Wellcome Images illustrate the current weather conditions at the Wellcome Library in London.

A trade card for Fer Bravais, which was supposed to cure anaemia, scrofulous diathesis, atonic diarrhoea. Published:circa 1890. Wellcome Images reference: L0044109.

Tate galleries inspired this experiment: images from their collections are displayed on the London Underground to match the weather above ground. In keeping with our open source preference, the current weather conditions are taken from OpenWeatherMap.

Wellcome Images released over 100,000 high resolution images for use under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence in January 2014. This provides plenty of weather-related images to match with the current weather conditions.

Wellcome Weather may or may not help you to decide if you need your umbrella or your sunglasses before coming to visit us, but you will discover some images that perhaps you wouldn’t have expected to find in our collections.

Author: Natalie Pollecutt is Library Systems Officer at the Wellcome Library.