Scaling museum digitisation: A technology-driven approach for object collections

Abstract

The Science Museum Group (SMG) cares for one of the world’s most significant collections of science, technology, engineering and medicine, comprising over half a million objects and 7 million archive and photographic items. Historically, only a small proportion of the collection has been digitised, limiting public access. The ‘One Collection’ project created a unique opportunity to transform SMG’s digitisation capabilities by integrating digitisation into a major multi-year store move involving over 300,000 objects. To meet the ambitious target of digitising 75 per cent of moved objects, SMG developed a highly efficient, technology-driven workflow that reduced total digitisation time from over 1 hour to under 10 minutes per object. Key innovations included barcoding all objects with unique machine-readable identifiers, developing a bespoke rapid data capture application for inventory and building an automated pipeline to rename files and ingest images into the digital asset management system. This automated workflow, together with a connected information system ecosystem, dramatically reduced manual processing and improved data consistency. The efficient workflow underpinned a ten-fold increase in images published online from 25,000 in 2018 to over 245,000 by 2025. In parallel with the increase in published images, there has been a significant increase in the number of website visitors to 1.8 million in 2025. This paper demonstrates how the large-scale digitisation of diverse object collections can be achieved through the adoption of technology-driven workflows. This article is also included in The Business & Management Collection which can be accessed at http://hstalks.com/business.