Global database links collections from the world's 73 largest natural history museums

The initiators of this global database are the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, the American Museum of Natural History Museum in New York City and the Natural History Museum in London. In the first phase of this initiative, the holdings of 73 of the world's largest natural history museums were initially assessed. The aim is to share the knowledge in natural history collections worldwide and make it available to everyone as a scientific infrastructure.

The study shows that there are 1.1 billion objects and therefore an incredible amount of relevant information lying dormant in scientific collections. However, most of these materials are not indexed, i.e. only 16 per cent of the collections have digitally searchable data records. This is the first step in an ambitious endeavour to inventory global holdings that can help scientists and policy makers find solutions to pressing, far-reaching problems such as climate change, food shortages, human health, pandemic preparedness and wildlife conservation.

Beyond their exhibitions, the world's natural history museums preserve and explore an unrivalled archive of the history of our planet and our solar system. These natural history collections offer a unique insight into our planet's past. They are increasingly being used to make predictions about our future. While museums have traditionally acted independently, the aim of this new approach is for all the world's organisations to work together to create a global collection of their objects that is as complete as possible.

To better understand this immense, untapped resource, leading scientists from a dozen major natural history museums have created an innovative but simple framework to rapidly assess the scope and composition of natural history museum collections worldwide.

The organisers created a common framework of 19 collection types for 16 geographic regions with 304 different cells that capture collection categories. The 19 collection types include biological, geological, palaeontological and anthropological collections and 16 terrestrial and marine regions covering the entire Earth.

The Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change (LIB) preserves and researches its scientific collections with a total of 16 million objects from the fields of zoology, mineralogy, geology and palaeontology at its sites in Hamburg and Bonn.

The project is explained in a recent article (23 March 2023) published in the journal Science:

"A GLOBAL APPROACH FOR NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM COLLECTIONS"