The Natural History Museum, London has increasingly been creating digital data about its collections in recent years, with a formal Digital Collections Programme established since 2014. Efforts to monitor the outcomes and impact of this work to date have focused on metrics of digital access, such as download events, and on citations of digital specimens as a measure of use. Digitisation projects and resulting research have also been used as impact case studies, highlighting areas such as human health and conservation.
The new economic study - carried out by Frontier Economics Ltd for the Natural History Museum, London - predicts that investing in digitising natural history museum collections could result in a tenfold return. The Natural History Museum, London, has so far made over 4.9 million digitised specimens freely available online, resulting in 28 billion records being downloaded in over 429,000 download events since 2015.
Digitisation is the process...