Transcribe Wellcome makes available transcribed accession and registration records for the collections 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, and now part of Wellcome Collection, 'a free museum and library that aims to challenge how we all think and feel about health'. The Transcribe Wellcome app also contains tables listing the auction houses from which many collections items were purchased, and about recipient museums (and some libraries) to whom items from the Wellcome collections were transferred in the period between Sir Henry Solomon Wellcome's death in 1936 and the early 1980s. Transcribed dispersal records, documenting these collection dispersals, will be added in future.
The Wellcome collections were - and are - extensive. At Wellcome's death 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 (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.
Transcribe Wellcome aims to helps researchers explore the provenance and collecting histories of items acquired for the Wellcome museum and library between 1897 and 2000. Whilst transcription is still underway, the app is already available for use as a tool for research and analysis. Entire sequences of accession and registration numbers are being imported into Transcribe Wellcome to help researchers navigate the numerous legacy accession and registration systems.
Around 3300 library accession entries had been previously partially transcribed, and these partial transcriptions are also available on Transcribe Wellcome.
The following sequences of accession numbers are now available to search on Transcribe Wellcome:
Transcribe Wellcome also includes tables listing:
Accessioning is the process of recording the admission of an item or group of items into a collection [PAS 197:2009 Code of practice for cultural collections management]. Accessioning usually takes place as soon as possible after acquisition, when the museum or library obtains responsibility for an item or group of items, but at Wellcome - particularly in the early twentieth century - accessioning rarely kept pace with acquisition, and consequently even this basic stage of documentation was often completed retrospectively.
Registration is a term used by museum professionals to refer to the process of creating and keeping records about the museum collection. At the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum, registration was generally restricted to items considered to have greater significance or value, including those going on display in the museum's galleries.
The numerous numbering systems for Wellcome museum and library collections are summarised on the page on Wellcome accession and registration systems.
New transcriptions of accession and registration details are being added regularly. We are very grateful to all of our transcribers, without whom Transcribe Wellcome would not have been possible.
We are also actively planning to make further datasets available for transcription soon, including:
More detailed information about dispersals from Wellcome is also being gradually added to enrich the Transcribe Wellcome dataset. If you can confirm the current whereabouts of an item or groups of items currently marked as recipient 'unknown' - especially if you know of catalogue records online that we could link to or harvest - please email transcribe@wellcome.org.
Similarly, we hope in future to link library accession records in Transcribe Wellcome to both inventory and catalogue records relating to these items.