Global push to put natural history collections online gets major U.K. boost

Tucked away in drawers and cabinets in hundreds of institutions around the world may be answers to how our planet formed, how life evolved and interacts, and how resilient it may be in the future. But those collections—millions of ancient rocks and fossils, pressed plants, pinned insects, and other specimens—can only yield insights if researchers around the world can access them. Now, efforts to digitize collections, making them accessible to all, have received a major boost. Last week, the U.K. government announced that, beginning in 2026, it will provide £155 million (almost $200 million) over the following 10 years for the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London to put the majority of the country’s natural history collections online. “It’s really going to make a huge difference in terms of what the NHM can do,” says Gil Nelson, a scientist at the University of Florida who runs Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio), a database with information on almost 140 million specimens from across the United States. The U.K. funding should also accelerate large-scale digitization efforts in Europe, by consolidating collaborations. But in the U.S., Nelson and other researchers fear their projects could be left behind if the U.S. government doesn’t ante up a similar bolus of funding. Helen Hardy, who runs NHM’s digitization efforts, says she “is super excited” by the promised funding, announced last week by UK Research and Innovation ...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news