The Art of Digitisation

The digitisation team at the Natural History Museum are working to digitise the Museum’s entire collection containing 80 million specimens.

Digitisation is the process of converting physical information into a digital form. This can include a range of information about a specimen, such as where it was collected and when, and may include images. We release our collections data onto the Museum’s Data Portal so that global researchers, scientists, artists and more have free and open access to the digital collection.

The digitisation team invited members of the public to create new imagined insects inspired by our collection during an NHM Late event. We then imaged these artworks to create the dataset below of co-created imagined insects to share the Art of Digitisation.