GIG Visit to the Wellcome Trust Library 21st November 2018, by Cassie Bowman

I’ve been visiting as many different kinds of libraries as possible for my chartership, and so when the opportunity came up to visit the Wellcome Library, I was really excited. I have a personal interest in historical medical literature, as well as a professional curiosity in the way different libraries operate. The Wellcome Library is not only a specialist medical history library, but it also allows in the public, and is housed alongside the exhibitions of the Wellcome Collection.

The tour began in one of their teaching rooms, which has a secret passage for safely transporting rare books and other materials without exposing it to the outside world. After an introduction to how the library came about, and the ethos behind it, we were shown the catalogue. I was particularly interested in how they are digitising older material using really high quality photography equipment, indexing the text for ease of searching. This is such a great resource, serving to preserve precious materials whilst also providing users with a fascinating insight into the history of medicine. A great deal of this information is also free, opening knowledge for a wider audience. It is a quiet, calm space once you enter, with a pleasing juxtaposition of a bank of computers on one side, and a wall of paintings from Henry Wellcome’s collection adorning the wall up the stairs. Their display of new books serves to show that there is no information hierarchy at work in the Wellcome Library, with serious tomes on the psychology displayed next to books on witchcraft and sorcery.

As it was a tour for librarians, there were a lot of questions regarding the classification system used by the Wellcome Library. The library is broadly split into two halves, both running different systems simultaneously, which must be a nightmare for the shelvers! The diversity of material was great to see, and I was amused to see the subject of Quackery next to Women in Medicine.

Once we’d had look around the library, we were taken to the stores of Henry Wellcome’s painting collection, which was filled with some amazingly strange images of leg transplants alongside more traditional looking portraits of Galileo.

Finally, we visited the Reading Room, which is an Instagram dream of beautiful seating areas, exhibition pieces such as an internal slice of a human body, and, of course, a myriad of books and magazines. The whole Library has a very comfortable feel to it – a mixture of being functional and aesthetically pleasing. For me, the Wellcome Library itself demonstrates the connection between science and art – a creative space for absorbing knowledge and discovering fascinating things about ourselves and our past.