Collections Digital Strategy Alan Hart

Collections Digital Strategy

Science Strategy: Challenge: A new generation of natural history museums – revolutionise our collections use and availability.

• Vision – what we want to be: The Digital NHM. A new wave of digital Museums

• Strategic Goals – planned objectives we want to achieve• Approach to digitisation – how we are going to deliver

this new strategy

Collections Digital Strategy

• Infrastructure: complete the databasing of our collections and make this information available in an open digital format

• Digital Museum: Establish high-throughput digitisation pipelines to make large volumes of our data available digitally

• Work with our partners to create national virtual natural history collections

Measuring success: Ensure 20 million of our specimens are available in digital formats (5 years)

Note: anticipate complete in 10 years.

Collections Digital Strategy

Collections Digital strategy

Science Group Planning ConferenceApril 2013. Digitisation strategy.

• 1. Strategy Development and organisation• 2. Digitisation and the generation of a virtual collection• 3. Enhance our data, improve our systems• 4. Content management• 5. Visibility and discovery• 6. Strategic alliances• 7. Resources, our staff

• What are the inter-dependencies? Key is to establish a Digital Programme & associated board to drive forward.

80,000,000 - Wide ranging collection types

DEP SPECS RECORDS TYPES WET SLIDES

Palaeontology 6,919,207 2,364,232 43,146 1,500 30,000

Mineralogy 423,563 425,000 615 1,200 83,500

Botany 5,863,000 127,200 172,750 908 Unknown

Entomology 33,753,257 57,197 612,796 6,736,612 788,159

Zoology 27,501,350 1,986,000 325,000 22,000,000 771,000

TOTALS 74,460,377 4,959,629 1,054,307 28,740,220 1,672,659

L&A 5,460,000

Collections Digital strategy

Curatorial challenge – significant backlogs in areas; Effective re-curation and audit of entire collection to a modern standard?

• Strategic partnerships, investigate potential for funding, external partnerships (e.g. HLF)

Museums in the information age – Survival of the most Digital? –

‘The Heritage Lottery Fund is now willing to invest in digital only projects, as people who do find them will play around and use them in ways we cannot yet imagine - Museums need to evolve to remain relevant in the age in which they operate’

Caroule Souter, Chief Executive HLF

Collections Digital strategy

Questions?