Over the past ten years libraries, archives and museums have embraced digitisation as a means of getting relatively inaccessible and little-used research collections out into the world. At the same time, researcher funders and institutions - especially in the biomedical sciences - have adopted policies to support open access (OA) to publicly-funded research, mostly in the form of journal articles. But while commercially-funded digitisation projects have often been built for well-defined and long-established ‘target audiences’, publicly- or charitable foundation-funded digitisation has often been accompanied by more nebulous ambitions to ‘engage’ with lay audiences. Crowd-sourcing and co-curation models have been applied in an attempt to turn ‘engagement’ with digital content into a more democratic process: forms of ‘public history’ that blur the boundaries of history as an academic discipline. This paper explores these issues in relation to the Wellcome Library’s digitisation programme, and highlights some specific issues arising from history of medicine’s essentially trans-disciplinary character, straddling medical science and the humanities. It argues that if the potential of digitisation to engender meaningful forms of ‘public history’ is to be realised, greater emphasis must be placed on making the range of outputs arising from scholarly research available to audiences outside the academy. In particular, it highlights the growth of bibliographic databases linked to full-text OA repositories as an opportunity and a challenge to the HSTM research community, specifically in the context of programmes of public history linked to digitised primary resources.