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 Conference April 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

DEPSPECSRECORDSTYPESWETSLIDES Palaeontology6,919,2072,364,23243,1461,50030,000 Mineralogy423,563425, ,20083,500 Botany5,863,000127,200172,750908Unknown Entomology33,753,25757,197612,7966,736,612788,159 Zoology27,501,3501,986,000325,00022,000,000771,000 TOTALS74,460,3774,959,6291,054,30728,740,2201,672,659 L&A5,460,000 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?