The Transcribe Wellcome project began in March 2020, with the aim of eventually transcribing all the accession and collections registration records of the former Wellcome Historical Medical Museum [WHMM], and of Wellcome Historical Medical Library [WHML] (later known as the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine, or simply Wellcome Library).
The Wellcome collections were - and are - extensive. When Henry Wellcome died in 1936, the museum object collection alone was estimated at around 1 million objects. Today Wellcome Collection encompasses nearly 400,000 library works (both contemporary publications and rare books, including more than 600 incunabula printed before 1500), an estimated 21,000 manuscripts in more than 50 languages, around 250,000 prints, paintings, drawings and photographs, 800 archive collections and approximately 8,000 moving image and sound titles. Sir Henry Wellcome's Museum Collection, a closed collection of over 117,000 historic museum objects relating to medical history and the history of science has been on long-term loan to the Science Museum since 1976.
The archive which documents the activities of the Wellcome museum and library from the 1890s onwards, including the histories of acquisition, provenance, and dispersal of the collections items, itself comprises almost 600 boxes of mostly handwritten or typescript documentation. Although most of this archive (archive collection reference: WA/HMM) was digitised in 2018 and is available online, it remains a very large, complex, and difficult to navigate aggregation of material.
By transcribing the main series of accession and registration records, we aim to help researchers explore the provenance and collecting histories of items acquired for the Wellcome museum and library between 1897 and 2000, and to trace the recipient museums and libraries to which Wellcome collection items were transferred between 1936 and 1983.
Whilst we work towards making the transcribed data available online, we have put together this documentation site to support our growing community of transcribers and researchers using the museum and library archive.