The UK’s museums and botanical gardens hold exceptional natural science collections of around 150 million objects.

Digitisation, the process of converting physical information into a digital form, has vast potential to open up collections data to unlimited numbers of researchers (across the sciences and humanities) and other audiences, creating a sustainable, freely accessible resource. Some UK organisations have already begun digitisation efforts, however, the scale of the task is enormous and requires significant investment. As a first step, we need to understand the scope of the UK’s natural science collections, and of digital capability across UK collection-holding institutions.

A group of 15 UK museums and botanic gardens have come together to launch a new programme to work with, support and train collection holding organisations. This initiative offers a unique opportunity to build a UK community who support and learn from each other as they tackle the challenges of digitisation.

The Arts and Humanities Research Council are funding pilot projects in 2021-22 to work with UK collection holders to develop:

1. A more complete understanding of the UK’s natural science collections, and of digital capability across UK institutions;

2. A strong UK digital network and vision;

3. Pilot training and training materials in digitisation methods and data mobilisation.

We are kicking off this program with a virtual workshop where we will outline the project plan as well as how to get involved in the scoping and training activities. During this workshop, we will be seeking feedback on a number of digitisation issues to help us to gauge interest and inform the next steps.

Kick off workshop - Setting natural science data free