Wellcome Library's Medical Collection goes digital in Egypt

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A pioneering new partnership between the Wellcome Library in London and Egypt’s Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA) will help reveal the story of early medicine in the Eastern world and enable rare materials to be universally accessible for the first time.

The Wellcome Library will be making items available from its collection of rare materials relating to both Ancient and Modern Egypt in digital form to BA for the first time. These items will eventually become part of BA’s own online library and will also feature in the World Digital Library, a portal to cultural content worldwide.

The material from the Wellcome Library consists of visual, documentary, manuscript and printed material in several languages and will enhance BA’s current resources.

Inaugurated in 2003, the BA is the leading institution for the documentation of Egyptian, Arabic and Islamic cultural heritage and a commemoration of the Library of Alexandria, which was established in the 3rd century BC.

The Wellcome Library is one of the world’s leading resources for the history of medicine and is part of the Wellcome Trust, the largest charity in the UK, which spends around £600 million a year funding biomedical research.