Visual resources in the Wellcome Library

The following resources are used as part of a Wellcome Library workshop.

Subject areas that are rich in imagery
Genre terms identified on the library catalogue
Journals
Wellcome Library catalogue
Websites

Subject areas that are rich in imagery:

Subjects are located at different places in the library according to which Collection they are in, and each Collection has a different classification scheme.

Genre terms identified on the library catalogue:
Illustrated Works
Scientific Illustrations
Paintings - see also related categories
Drawings - see also related categories
*Watercolors - see also Gouaches
Photographic Prints
Engravings
Lithographs
Posters
Herbals
DVDs
Video recording / Video cassettes

*Note the American spelling is required.

Journals
Arts and Museums titles:
Journal of Material Culture
Journal of Popular Culture
Journal of the History of Collections
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes
Leonardo
Museum Practice
Museums Journal
Things

Medical titles with long runs:
British Medical Journal
Chemist and Druggist
Lancet
Medical Life
Medical Times and Gazette
Practitioner
Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine

History titles:
Dental History
Medical History
Renaissance Quarterly
Svensk medicinhistorisk tidskrift [Swedish Journal for the History of Medicine]
Vesalius
Victorian Studies

Popular Science titles:
BBC Focus
Cosmos
Discover
Nature
New Scientist
Scientific American
SEED

The Wellcome Library catalogue
These examples use many features in the main Library catalogue, but the Library's Encore catalogue can also be useful for searching across collections.

Word Search
Word search finds the word anywhere in the library catalogue record: title, subject, notes, author etc.

Try several ways to describe your topic for best results. Alternative searches to war wounds might be:
For war: military, soldier*, army
For wound*: injur*, casualt*

Try searching 'Pictures' from the drop down menu for war wound* and then for (war) and (injury or injuries) is there a difference?
Find one print and one photograph in the search results.

Subject Search
Specific words or phrases are ascribed to each item in the catalogue to describe the subjects it covers. You can see these 'Topic' terms in the catalogue record. They allow you to search for a topic even if the word or phrase does not appear in the title of the work. This is particularly useful for finding visual resources where the title may not adequately describe what is represented.

The library catalogue uses two systems of Subject Headings: MeSH and LCSH.

Some useful subject headings for visual resources:

Genre
The 'Genre' option in the library catalogue is useful for searching the Picture, Print and Drawing Collection, or to search specific formats such as DVDs or lithographs.

Do a 'Genre' search for Posters and 'Limit/Sort' by South Africa as a 'Word in the Place Subject' and the term AIDS as a 'Term Throughout the Record'.

Reference No.
Useful for finding collections of visual resources that have been digitised:

Select the 'Reference No.' option at the top of the screen in the library catalogue, and search the entire catalogue for dig*

digaids = aids posters
digfugitive = anatomical fugitive sheets
dthomson = Nineteenth century photographs by John Thomson

Exhibitions
There is an LCSH subject term: Exhibitions but it can be more effective to use the term 'exhibitions' in 'Word' search, in combination with other words. This will pick up on any notes that say something was published in conjunction with an exhibition, or as a catalogue for an exhibition. Searching for the term 'catalogue' tends to produce items relating to library catalogues, not exhibitions.

Try a 'Word' search on the library catalogue to find some of the following:

Exhibition* and Darwin
Exhibition* and evolution
Exhibition* and Wellcome

Websites

Wellcome Film
A digital collection of moving images on 20th-century healthcare and medicine . Over 450 titles - 100 hours of film and video are freely available under Creative Commons licences.

Wellcome Image Awards
The annual Wellcome Image Awards recognise the creators of the most informative, striking and technically excellent images among recent acquisitions to Wellcome Images, as chosen by a panel of judges.

Wellcome Library digitisation projects
Details of digitised collections in the Wellcome Library.

Wellcome Collection exhibitions
Information, images and videos from Wellcome Collection exhibitions past and present.