Yesterday I visited the wonderful Oxford University Museum of Natural History and enjoyed a behind the scenes tour looking at items in the Hope Entomological Collections. We were told about provenance of the collection and its historical and scientific value.
Later in the day I came across an extensive 'born digital' collection of images with associated metadata of wild species and natural history objects, that together form a virtual field guide to UK biodiversity: http://www.bioimages.org.uk/.
I asked the creator of the collection, Malcolm Storey, if he had considered donating the collection to a museum at some point, and he said that from his experience there was little interest in an image collection.
I'm not sure if this is the appropriate forum but I am interested in people's thoughts on the donation of 'born digital' collections to museums. Would the donation of a 'born digital' collection be of interest to a museum? Also, specifically, are there any organisations that might be interested in accepting the BioImages database at some point, that could perhaps contact Malcolm to discuss?
thank you
Tanya
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