Wellcome Library and ProQuest’s Early European Books Programme

ProQuest and London's Wellcome Library are joining forces to expand access to the library's rich historical treasures. As part of its Early European Books digitization programme ProQuest will be digitizing the Library's entire holdings of European books printed before 1700, comprising more than 15,500 volumes, and will be making the collection available for free throughout the UK and the developing world.

The Wellcome is the fourth major library to participate in this groundbreaking project. ProQuest launched the project with the Danish Royal Library, Copenhagen and the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze in Italy, and has already made these rich national collections available to all Danish and Italian citizens, while a third digitization operation is currently starting up at the National Library of the Netherlands. In all cases, ProQuest sets up a scanning studio on site at the library and uses state-of-the-art technology to create high-definition color images of every page, including the often lavish bindings and covers.

The collection contains many rare or obscure texts on subjects ranging from alchemy to zoology, and includes many of the most spectacularly illustrated books of the period. Landmark works include the first edition of anatomist Andreas Vesalius's De humani corporis fabrica (1543), the complete works of surgeon Ambroise Paré (c.1510-1590), Rabanus Maurus's encyclopedia De sermonum proprietate (1467), whose medical section is sometimes called the first printed medical book, and a beautiful colored copy of Hartmann Schedel's Liber chronicarum (‘The Nuremberg Chronicle', 1493), formerly owned by the artist William Morris (1834-1896). In addition to complementing the English works already digitized as part of ProQuest's Early English Books Online database, the new resource will provide access to important continental editions of works by famous English medical authors, such as William Harvey's seminal work on the circulation of the blood, De motu cordis (1628), which was first published in Germany.

Through the Early European Books project, ProQuest is building an increasingly comprehensive survey of printing in Europe to 1700 by digitizing and bringing together the holdings of major rare book libraries.

Early European Books collections are available for purchase by libraries worldwide and are delivered via a multilingual interface which allows powerful searching of the detailed indexing, as well as cross-searching of the well-known Early English Books Online database, which includes facsimiles of 125,000 books printed in English or in the British Isles between 1473 and 1700.