Commons:Digital Collections Programme, Natural History Museum, London

Context

The Digital Collections Programme was initiated by the Natural History Museum, London in 2014 to digitise and release data on 80 million items in its collection. 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. At present this information is locked away within hundreds of millions of specimens, labels and archives distributed across the globe, available to just a handful of scientists. We want to unlock the collection and share this vital resource with the world. We provide open access to the data that we have about the natural world on the Museum’s Data Portal. However, our data portal is accessed by a mainly scientific audience. To inspire more people with our collections we share our latest updates on Twitter and Instagram and share stories behind digitising the collection on the Museum’s blog. We are also sharing select projects with the Wikimedia community and would love to hear from you if you use our content or have specific ideas of what you would like us to share more of on Wikimedia.

Authors

Peter Wing

Robyn Crowther

Related categories

• Images donated by the Natural History Museum, London - for all images; see usage statistics (may be slow to load)
• Type specimens of the Natural History Museum, London
• Lepidoptera of the Natural History Museum, London
• Hesperiidae of the Natural History Museum, London
• Lycaenidae of the Natural History Museum, London
• Nymphalidae of the Natural History Museum, London
• Papilionidae of the Natural History Museum, London
• Pieridae of the Natural History Museum, London
• Riodinidae of the Natural History Museum, London
• Ornithoptera (Birdwing) butterflies collection, Natural History Museum, London
• Trogonoptera (Birdwing) butterflies collection, Natural History Museum, London
• Troides (Birdwing) butterflies collection, Natural History Museum, London
• Siphonaptera of the Natural History Museum, London