A Decade of Digitisation | Digital Collections

A guest blog by Pete Wing

Pete Wing with fellow digitiser Phaedra Kokkini and the Madagascan Lepidoptera they digitised.

January 2023 marks the tenth anniversary since I first started digitising the Museum’s collections. A lot has changed in that time but the main principle of digitisation has remained the same: to transform the access and use of the Museum’s collections through unlocking natural history data and sharing this with the world.

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Data in Action: British butterflies body size changes in response to climate change | Digital Collections Programme

Drawer of Silver-studded blue (Plebejus argus) butterflies from the Museum’s collection

A brand new scientific paper applies computer vision to over 125,000 of the Museum’s digitised Butterfly collection to understand how animals may respond to climate change.

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Breaking the Bias with Grace Mary Crowfoot: Botanist, Archaeologist, and Advocate for Women’s Rights | Digital Collections Programme

A guest blog by Larissa Welton

This International Women’s Day, I want to celebrate the incredible achievements of Grace Mary Crowfoot, a botanist, textile archaeologist, anthropologist, and pioneering anti-FGM advocate and to share her story of breaking biases and fighting inequality for women.

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Celebrating new discoveries on Darwin Day 2022

Photograph of Charles Robert Darwin

12th February 1832: There has been a little swell on the sea to day, & I have been very uncomfortable Charles Darwin’s diary entry on his birthday 190 years ago.

While on board the voyage of the Beagle, Charles Darwin recorded the journey and mentions notable days like Christmas day and New Year’s day, but although he records each year what he did on the 12th February, he never mentions that it was his birthday.

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What’s in our UK natural science collections and why does this matter? | Digital Collections Programme

A guest blog by Tara Wainwright

Botanical sheets from Kew ©RBG Kew

The UK holds hundreds of millions of natural history specimens of scientific importance. Exactly how many specimens and what those specimens are, is currently unknown. Unveiling the contents of the UK’s collections will open the door to further digitisation and unlock the full scientific potential of UK natural science collections.

Digitising, the process of converting physical information into a digital form, the UK’s natural science collection, opens up a unique and valuable national resource to the world and enable the UK to be part of current and future scientific collaborations to find solutions to the biggest challenges of our time.

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