Digital Platform

The new Wellcome Collection digital platform, exploring approaches to building an API that searches our archive collections.

What's the "Wellcome digital platform"?

Wellcome are developing a new digital platform for Wellcome Collection, that will enable us to improve the experience we offer to readers and researchers. We also want to make it easier for third-party developers to build things with our data and collections.

This means providing programmatic access to our digital assets, metadata and web content by developing a simple, unified and coherent set of APIs.

User led development

We intend to be led by the needs of the user first, and to be pragmatic about technical decisions in that light. Prototyping is part of the process of discovering the shape of an eventual API.

Developing in the open

We intend to develop in the open, so that others can learn from our mistakes and successes. We also want to be transparent on the state of work in progress and provide a forum to raise issues and discuss approaches.

Everything we create will be open-source, under an MIT license. We will package things that are useful to others as standalone components, so that they can be easily re-used outside of our platform.