An exploration of the Wellcome Library's experiences of various types of partnerships in digitisation. Looks at the different types of partnerships, including, amongst others, those with publishers, contractors, sub-contractors, funders, internal partners, digitisation partners - commercial and non-profit, contributor libraries and outsourcing. This presentation looks at the expected and unexpected benefits and challenges associated with these relationships.

1. The ups and downs of
partnerships in digitisation
Toni Hardy and Damian Nicolaou
Hand in Hand:
12/11/2015

3. Wellcome Trust
• Global charitable foundation
• Improving human and animal health
• Supporting biomedical research
and the medical humanities
• Exploring medicine in historical and
cultural contexts

5. Wellcome Collection
• Explores connections between medicine,
life and art in the past, present and future
• Exhibitions and public events
• Publications and book prize
• International projects
• Digital projects
...and a world class research library!

7. Wellcome Library
• Free library with focus on history of
medicine and health
• One of the world's major resources for the
study of medical history
• Growing collection of material relating to
contemporary medicine and biomedical
science in society

8. Our Holdings
• 700 incunabula
• 8,000 journal titles
• 6,300 recordings
• 9,000 Western manuscripts
• 16,000 Asian Manuscripts
• 150,000 rare books; 800,000 modern books
• 100,000 paintings, prints and photographs
• 700 archives, containing 1.5m items

9. Transformation Strategy
• To provide global access to, and expert
interpretation of, a world class collection that
explores medicine in its cultural contexts:
• Targeted collecting – putting challenges in
context
• Expert interpretation – engaging (new)
audiences
• Strategic digitisation – online access to our
collections

10. Digitisation Programme
• Target: 50m images. 20m images so far:
• Archives 1,995,000 Rare books 4,100,000
• 19th century/UK-MHL/MHL 13,160,000
• MOH 470,000 Chemist & Druggist 535,000
• Arabic Mss 69,440 Western Mss 31,109
• 990 audio-visual titles (30,000,000 images!)
• Paintings, prints & photos 3,000

11. How we do things
• We have a very sophisticated and complex
set of systems in place to ingest, store,
manage and deliver our digital assets

13. Lots of partners

14. From lots of places

17. Chemist & Druggist
• Over a year to sign contract with publisher
once agreed due to takeover
• Publisher donated their set to us for
destructive scanning
• Internet Archive have rigid workflow
• Needed to gap fill with scans from NLW
• IA content discoverable on Google
• Can make freely available

19. London’s Pulse (Medical
Officer of Health reports)
• Partial JISC funding equals hoop jumping
• Shipped to and digitised in Holland
• LMA volumes digitised at Wellcome Library
• Work to enhance text and tables in India
• Packing and shipping resource intensive
• Issues with quality and accuracy of
digitisation
• Zooniverse collaboration

21. Ancestry
• Significant amount of time and effort went
into set up of project which is very small in
scale for both WL and Ancestry
• Dealing with project managers in UK and
USA
• Images available via Ancestry and
Wellcome Library with conditions
• Contract detailed but still had unforeseen
issues
• Timescales

23. Early European Books
• ProQuest sub contracted digitisation out to
Numen
• Communication difficult as ProQuest, not
Wellcome were Numen’s customer
• Staff changes at ProQuest caused work to
slow then rapidly accelerate
• Difficulty getting images back from ProQuest
• Restriction on availability of images for 15
years

25. UK MHL
• Digitised by Internet Archive using
workflow established during C&D project
• Jointly funded by JISC (62%) and
Wellcome (38%)
• Partner libraries – 6 HE and 4 non HE
libraries
• If partner libraries fail to/under deliver we
have to pick up slack or pay difference
• Strict end date

27. External archives digitisation
• 9 archive partners
• Set specific requirements for metadata,
images and sensitivity
• Imported their metadata into our systems
• Importance of communication
• Collaborative effort for publicising
collections
• No exclusivity

28. Common Themes
• Priorities – higher priority for one partner
over the other. Do they want what you want?
• Who do they work for?
• Communication and managing relationships
and expectations is key to success
• Consider use cases present and future
• Broader reach. Content hosted in UK, Europe
and USA
• Standards and responsibilities

29. Things to consider
• Things change over time! People, goals, priorities
• Agree everything in writing – even then
interpretation may be different
• Don’t neglect internal partners
• Can you live with conditions imposed by funders
or commercial partners in the long term?
• Are you prepared to do things their way?
• Could you do it on your own?
• Even ‘free’ things have costs

30. Final thoughts
• Partnerships can have long lasting impact
• Allow us to reach goals more quickly and
leverages our own available funding
• Partners may have different priorities but they
still want the project to succeed
• Open access on multiple platforms for
multiple audiences equals more opportunities
for engagement and data reuse