Something new for a new year…

This article was originally published on medium.com

Bleigiessen sculpture by Thomas Heatherwick. Wellcome Trust, 215 Euston Road.

After seven amazing years leading Wellcome Collection’s digital department, I am leaving to join PLOS as their Chief Digital Officer.

I’ve loved my time at Wellcome. The team’s creativity, professionalism and warmth have made the last seven years the most rewarding of my career.

I will miss working with and being part of the best digital team in any museum or library. A team working at the top of their game who have done and continue to do amazing work.

When I joined Wellcome, I said, to my then-boss Simon, that I wanted to do three things:

1. Grow the online audience to an engaged 3.5M people (it was around 1 million at the time but with a high bounce rate);
2. Design a digital offer that Wellcome could be proud of, and those in other institutions would want to emulate or learn from;
3. Build a team that could solve difficult problems and a culture that would mean they would want to.

And that is exactly what the team has done.

In 2017 we set out to extend Wellcome Collection’s reach by designing a digital platform that supported the venue, preserved and made accessible our collections, and reached people around the world with strong narrative content​.

Last year over 3.6M people used wellcomecollection.org, a site that, for most people, is Wellcome Collection not only a channel to promote Wellcome Collection. And those people are now reading, researching and engaging ever more deeply with our stories and collections. Last year, on average, they looked at 4.6 pages per session, and in total, they spent 113k hours reading content on the site.

We regularly talk to institutions around the world who want to hear about: what we’ve done, how we’ve done it, and how to deploy our code or republish our stories or host our digitised collections.

The team constantly innovate to great effect — whether that is developing new ways to photograph our collection, our approach to online storytelling, supporting visitors to our exhibitions and events, unifying collection information or building beautifully engineered solutions to manage and preserve our digitised collections. Whether I think of the small changes or big audacious ones, the team has done world-class work.

More recently, with my colleagues on the Wellcome Collection Leadership Team, I have co-authored Wellcome Collection’s new strategy. But it won’t be for me to implement. It will be fascinating to see how the new strategy is delivered, but that job is a job for others. It is time to pass the reins to someone new.

Later this month, I join PLOS, and I couldn’t be more excited! PLOS is a not-for-profit, Open Access publisher, on a mission to accelerate progress in science and medicine by leading a transformation in research communication.

As PLOS’s Chief Digital Officer, I will be helping drive the adoption of digital technologies; transform the business and product strategy using technology and data; and evangelise how people, processes and technology can be brought together to deliver PLOS’s mission.

The opportunities and the possibilities are fascinating, and they have the potential to have an impact on the world. What more could anyone want of a new job?

Posted on February 8, 2023   #work