Reading Nature's Library

Reading Nature's Library at the Manchester Museum

Manchester Museum has over 4.5 million objects in its collection, gathered together over the past 200 years. The collections include Botany, Earth Science, Zoology, Ancient Egypt and Sudan, Archaeology, Living Cultures, Entomology, Numismatics and Archery. The labels and objects are a treasure trove of information about our world and the people that live in it. Recording this information is a challenging and time-consuming task. The information about many of these objects only exists on their labels, hidden away in our storerooms.

To fix this we have started a mass digitisation project to make our collection as accessible as possible. We began with our fossil collection and have now been able to make a start with our botany collection.

It is one of the largest and most important botanical collections in Britain, providing a record of the world's flora. A wonderful group of volunteers have photographed many of the microscope slides and we have worked with Zooniverse to get your help to digitise the specimen information.

Why?

By transferring the information about our specimens to an online searchable database researchers, educators and the public will be able to find specimens much more easily. For example, we would be able to track where and when different species occurred, helping us to understand evolution and how species spread across the globe.

How can you help?

The museum only has a small staff and a limited number of volunteers, so cataloguing our whole collection is too great a task for us to tackle alone. We need your help to get the information about our collection into our database so it can be used to help answer fundamental questions about our world and everything that lives in it. Can you help us unlock this information and release our collection's potential?