Online Strategy for The Wellcome Trust
Making The Wellcome Library content available to a global audience
A systems integration consultancy for The Wellcome Trust on how to expose content to enable users to browse, search and manipulate digital content online and discover content from the collections library. The scope included enabling users to identify and order material for use in the Library reading room from the Wellcome Digital Library website.
Challenge
The core challenge was to identify an architecture capable of handling a vast repository of documents and archive files to go online. This meant conversion of archive formats to web dissemination formats, caching to improve performance and reducing dependency on archive systems.
A strategic approach was called for in this consultancy, dealing with the high volumes of archived material in multiple formats across multiple library systems. Added complexity lay in the differing information management and governance roles of key stakeholders.
Approach
In formulating the requirement, it was clear there were many unknowns. Fusionworkshop identified capabilities and restrictions of the existing systems and the role middleware could play. Initial investigation and proof of concept exercises were carried out to ensure that the broad recommendation was possible and viable.
Team members had discussion with the vendors of the library systems, hardware manufacturers and vendors of third-party file conversion libraries. To make sense of such a complex requirement we involved our UX specialists, Web CMS specialists, BA/PM members of the team and a number of seasoned Web/Integration developers.
Techniques used included workshops, fact finding, interviews, and test implementations of third-party components.
Results
Recommendations from Fusionworkshop included how the Digital Delivery System would work, including the role of the CMS in access of images. The report documented how the CMS could integrate with existing and new systems, including:
- A Digital Asset Management system (Safety Deposit Box)
- A digitisation workflow system which manages the production of digital assets and the creation of associated descriptive, administrative and structural metadata (METS) files
- A single search system (Encore) which provides a discovery platform for the entire range of library holdings, including physical and digital collections held by the library, and external electronic resources for which the Library holds licences
The findings described how the Library systems interact to serve up content to the CMS, specifically:
- Improvements to how the Library systems pass data to each other
- How digital assets render when an end-user identifies content through Encore
- How Wellcome Library staff can discover and access content held in the DAM via the CMS to build web pages
“Fusionworkshop worked with us to deliver an important piece of consultancy. Their findings identified risks and made recommendations about how to mitigate them. They were able to draw on their experience in business-critical web projects and propose high performance solutions that were scalable, stable and addressed the current and future needs of our stakeholders.”
Robert Kiley,
Head of Digital Services
Your Next Steps
Call Me Back about Online Strategy Consultancy
The Wellcome Trust is a global charitable foundation which supports scientific research to improve human and animal health. The Trust also promotes the study and public understanding of health and medicine in their historical and cultural contexts.
“Fusionworkshop worked with us to deliver an important piece of consultancy. They were able to propose high performance solutions that were scalable, stable and addressed the current and future needs of our stakeholders...”
Robert Kiley,
Head of Digital Services
Related Content