Digital collections

Mobilising the world's natural history collections for the benefit of human wellbeing.

We are embarking on an epic journey to digitise 80 million specimens from one of the world’s most important natural history collections.

Digitising the Museum’s collection will give the global scientific community access to unrivalled historical, geographic and taxonomic specimen data gathered in the last 250 years.

The Museum’s Digital Collections Programme also works closely with global partners to develop standards and policies for specimen data that enables the Museum’s work to feed into the wider Natural Science global community.

The Museum also leads on international projects including the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) and SYNTHESYS+, a cross-European project to create the infrastructure enabling access to 115 natural history collections across Europe.   

Digital Collections Programme

We are establishing mass digitisation workflows to digitise one of the world's most important natural history collections