Catherine Draycott

Catherine Draycott has been Head of the Wellcome Trust’s Medical Photographic Library – now Wellcome Images - since 1992.  She has been Chairman of the British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies (BAPLA) since 2000, serving on it’s Executive committee since April 1997.

Her studies were in French and History of Art and, on leaving university, she did bilingual work then travelled in Europe and North Africa.  She was a freelance photographer for five years then worked in advertising, pr and press photography before joining the Wellcome Trust to develop a picture library for its enormous collection of over 2.5 million items.   Since starting at Wellcome, she has overseen the acquisition and development of a collection of 40,000 contemporary images combining a comprehensive collection on clinical medicine and disease with award-winning images of biomedical science.  She also managed a project to digitise all the existing photographs taken of the collections, pulling together metadata from databases to index cards to provide an accessible online resource of over 120,000 images.  The site has just been re-launched with larger images and new functionality as Wellcome Images at http://images.wellcome.ac.uk where it’s collection of images ranging from manuscripts, rare books and paintings to micrographs, scans and photographs spans the history of medicine and civilisation from antiquity to the present day.   

Catherine lives in West London with her husband and eight year old daughter.