I led the development and improvement of a public digitisation service to open up access to Wellcome Collection’s collections “on demand”. This required managing requests from the public as well as internal stakeholders for new digitisation, managing and providing mediated access to images that could not be made publicly available, supporting long-term digital archiving, and systems support.
I had taken responsibility for an existing service, with the aim to turn a complex, request-driven function into a more joined-up and sustainable service: easier for users to access, easier for staff to manage, and better connected to the wider digital infrastructure. This meant streamlining request handling, updating policies on access, rethinking delivery capacity and timescales, and improving the systems and documentation that supported day-to-day delivery.
The actions that delivered on this aim included:
- Ensuring continuity of service while changing systems and processes;
- Providing expert input into the procurement and implementation of a new internal picture library database, including overseeing the successful migration of hundreds of thousands of images twice in ten years;
- Improving discoverability for internal stakeholders of images that could not be made available on the public website;
- Improving communication and cross-team collaboration in the provision of new digitisation for internal and external requests;
- Establishing methods to track progress and share information about order processing and delivery timelines;
- Creating better internal consistency with processes and policies;
- Improving the management of order processing by integrating systems and databases;
- Reducing overheads on staff delivering the service, including using suppliers where appropriate, and removing payment requirements;
- Creating and maintaining detailed documentation.
This work combined major systems changes with continuous improvement, shaped by experimentation and stakeholder input. The result was a high-quality, free-to-access service that was manageable for the team to deliver within its capacity and made best use of the skills of both in-house photographers and suppliers. It improved support for external researchers, publishers, media productions and other users as well internal teams needing short- and medium-term digitisation support for exhibitions, research partnerships and other projects.
Image credit: Screenshot of public domain images, Wellcome Collection.
