Overview

Overview#

WORK IN PROGRESS - Updated Aug 2024

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National Collection Overview (excluding specimen holding organisations)#

The scale of collections held by natural history holding organisations can overwhelm data visualisations of overall UK collections, so in this area chart below they have been removed to allow more visibility of other collections.

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National Collection Overview (Museums only)#

A view on museum (including botanic gardens) collections only

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An overview of how the UK National Collection is formed, broken down by type of holding public institution:

  • Museum

  • Gallery

  • Library

  • Universities (which can include a Museum, Gallery, Libraries and Archives)

And not yet featuring Archives as handling the hierarchical nature of archive cataloguing brings up more complexity that has not yet been resolved.

This type classification, like much in this area, is somewhat ill-defined; most museums and galleries also have an archive and many also have library items. To give an alternative lower level view, other notebooks will try to break collections down by sub-type, so all the library collections (either at a library institution or a library collection at a museum/gallery/university) are counted together. As with many datasets, there are many different views that can be taken of the data and each brings different insights (and biases), there is no one view that can reveal all facts in a single glance.

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