Website Review: Codebreakers

Codebreakers, a website hosted by London’s Wellcome Library that went online in March 2013, illustrates both the pleasures and the dangers of online archives. The result of a £3.9 million digitization effort, the heart of the site is about a million pages of documents, mostly relating to the history of DNA and molecular biology, all freely accessible to scholars. The site aggregates document collections from the Wellcome’s own archives and four other institutions. Twenty-two leading figures in genetics, eugenics, biochemistry, and molecular biology are represented. The showpiece of a major redesign for the entire Wellcome Library site, Codebreakers splashily drives home the point that no library today is investing more in medical history than the Wellcome.

The pleasures are many. Any archive rat with an Internet connection can rummage through the file cabinets of James Watson, Francis Crick, Rosalind Franklin, Maurice Wilkins, the British Eugenics Society, Francis Galton, and many others. The collections contain correspondence, photographs, reprints, lab notebooks, and administrative memoranda, some of it never before available to scholars. After a preliminary search, one can easily filter the results by several criteria, most usefully by decade of authorship, and then go straight to the document. Once one locates a document, it can be examined in an online viewer that is a little finicky but powerful: a continuous zoom lets one blow up a document far enough to see, for example, that in January 1959, Crick badly needed a new typewriter ribbon. Documents can be downloaded as PDFs or as high- or low-resolution JPEG images. All that’s missing are the smell and feel of the paper—important aesthetically, to be sure, but rarely the crux of an argument.

The dangers are two. First is the illusion of completeness. Online archives rarely include every document from a paper collection. If I can see eighty (seventy? sixty?) percent of a collection without getting out of my bathrobe, maybe I can tell my story without the remaining fifth, or quarter, or third. The Codebreakers site succeeds to a remarkable degree in digitizing entire collections, not just teasers. However, it creates the illusion of completeness by aggregating so many key molecular biology collections: the showy site design doesn’t discourage the notion that here lies all of the history of early molecular biology. Especially in this age of shrinking humanities budgets, one wonders how many dissertations will be “good enough” with just the material here.

The second danger concerns accessibility. A well-curated conventional collection has a guide, called a finding aid, the heart of which is a hierarchical table of contents. This table is an invaluable way to quickly scan a collection, get a sense of its contents, and plan one’s research strategy. In Codebreakers, this table is hard to find at best (hint: look for links to “see this in context”), poorly implemented in some collections, and completely absent in others. Beyond the finding aid, the digital world offers the miracle of random access. “Online archive” is a misnomer: all digital collections are databases, which, when designed well, can permit the researcher to ask questions that would be impossibly time-consuming in the paper world. The utility of a database hangs on the system of fields and tags employed, which in Codebreakers is haphazard and inconsistent. These problems are the unavoidable result of aggregating a set of independently curated archival collections. Other weaknesses, though, stem from the site’s design. Navigation within the site is cumbersome: to return to the home page from an individual record, for example, it is easiest to simply re-Google “Wellcome Codebreakers.” Also, the advanced search queries the entire Wellcome Library; search results then have to be filtered using the cruder simple search criteria, negating much of the power of the advanced search.

For better and worse, historical research is likely to rely increasingly heavily on digital archives. Codebreakers is a real trove that will surely prompt the revision of several chapters of the history of molecular biology. Like all online collections, it will do so...